Small bedroom, 3.2 by 2.7 metres, monitors on stands about 40cm from the wall behind them. Every mix I do sounds balanced in the room and then has boomy, wooly low end in the car and on a laptop. It's consistently the same direction, which makes me think it's the room rather than my ears. What do I fix first without spending much?
Interim crutch while you sort the room: check your mixes on a single small speaker in mono at low volume, and reference against two commercial tracks you know well in the same session. Cheap, immediate, and it catches the boomy thing before you export.
Mono is underrated for this. A lot of 'too much bass in the car' is actually low end with phase problems that partially cancels on the monitors and doesn't in a car.
Measurement mic and free room measurement software costs about the price of a takeaway and turns all of this from guesswork into a graph. Worth it before you buy any treatment, so you're treating the actual problem.
40cm from the wall is an awkward distance for rear-ported monitors — it's far enough to cause a reflection null and close enough to get boundary boost. Either push them right up close (if the manual has a boundary EQ setting, use it) or get them further out. Sealed or front-ported cabinets are much less fussy about this.
Second the sweep. I'd also add: gate your expectations on a 3.2m room. You can make it good, you can't make it flat below about 60Hz. Learn the room's lie and use references and you'll ship fine mixes out of it.
@rawfileruth · 3mo ago · 3 replies
Consistent in one direction is good news — it means your room has a repeatable lie and you can correct for it. In a room that size the likely culprit is a null: a cancellation at your listening position around 80-160Hz, so you hear less bass than there is and you compensate by adding more.
Cheapest diagnostic before you buy anything: play a slow sine sweep from 40 to 250Hz and walk the room slowly. You'll hear it lurch loud and quiet. If your chair sits in one of the quiet spots, move the chair. Getting the listening position off the exact halfway point of the room length fixes a shocking amount for free.
After that, thick absorption in the corners does more for low end than anything else per pound spent. Not foam — foam does nothing below about 500Hz. Mineral wool or rockwool slabs, 10cm thick, stacked floor to ceiling in the two front corners.
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@metronome_mira · 3mo ago
Did the sweep. There's a very obvious dip around 110Hz right where I sit and it's much stronger a metre forward. Moving the desk this weekend.
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@rawfileruth · 2mo ago
That's the whole problem in one sentence. Aim for roughly 38% of the room length from the front wall as a starting point, then fine tune by ear with the sweep.
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