Recently we have spent some time working closely with voice actor Jordan Reynolds to solve some acoustics issues in his voiceover booth. While the acoustical quality of the booth he designed and built is quite impressive – everything from multilayer gypsum board construction for excellent isolation to custom welded door hinges! – one vexing problem remained: an incessant boominess that muddies the sound of his voice recordings. Jordan’s finely tuned ears knew something wasn’t right, and he brought us in to help solve the issue.
From previous experience in these small spaces we suspected that low frequency room modes might be involved. Room modes cause variations in sound pressure level – sometimes extreme variations – as you move through a space. When untreated, they also cause the sound to “ring” or resonate at particular frequencies that correspond to the room dimensions. In the case of Jordan’s voiceover booth, we used EASERA to measure some strong room modes in the 80-120Hz range illustrated clearly in the spectrogram plot below.
