Hi Martin,
As you may have seen on other threads I have played around with REW to try and improve the listening experience in SQ in my slightly challenging room, large glass windows each side of a rectangle. Having worked in a Sound and Vibration lab many years ago I had some acoustics measurement knowledge up front but I am no expert or a sound engineer. What REW did enable me to do in this house and the previous one was identify where things were bad acoustically. Mainly reverb and certain frequencies and re-enforced bass. I spent some weeks experimenting with materials and temporary wall hangings until I got what I thought was the best result I could and still be acceptable to Sue, SWMBO. It is a worth while thing to do IMHO to get the most you can from your room and setup.
First I would go to the Room Sim and enter your room dimensions and speaker positions, and 2 mic positions one for each ear. This will result in a frequency graph which will estimate the Frequency response 20hz to 300hz, you can now play around with speaker positions and listening positions trying to get a reasonably flat response, you can drag the head and speakers and see the graph change in real time. Once you have and idea of the best speaker and listening position onto the next step below.
The easiest and most effective thing to use in REW are Reverb time RT60 and EDT(Estimated Time Delay).
https://www.roomeqwizard.com/help/he...raph_rt60.html To do this after setting up your microphone at your listening position and calibrating it, you do this by playing a 20-20hz sweep from your computer through your hifi and recording it with REW, there is a simple help on how to calibrate the mic.
Next take a frequency sweep with your room as it is normally and when done look at RT60, look at the EDT graph and what you would like to see is that across the frequency sweep that it stays below 300ms, the lower the better, but all a zero would sound very dead. So you can then adjust speaker position, listening position and room treatments and take further sweep readings and compare results until you get it as best as you can. I would use your ears as well by listening to only a couple of tracks that have clear drums, bass, vocal, and 2 or 3 other instruments, you should hear changes as you go, some subtle and others more prominent.
One thing that can really help with acoustics in a room are curtains or a book case behind the listening position, I put CD shelving there with gapping, and soft furnishings dotted about, mirrors, TVs and other hard surfaces are not great. Any thing on the other walls to stop reflections helps, I purchased a couple of 60cm by 60cm simple pictures from TK Max and put 30mm of acoustic foam in the frames behind them, and put on the wall behind the speaker, it helped. As most acoustic sites will tell you moving speakers out from the wall is best but a lot do not say how far, I found this very helpful
https://www.cardas.com/system-setup if you can get close for your room you will have a good starting point. What I found surprising was how small changes could make quite big improvements. It takes a bit of trial and error, and there will be some compromise, unless you have the luxury of a dedicated listening room. Also experimenting with speaker toe in angles is very useful, I found it could improve acoustics as I could not move my speakers more that 40cm out from side walls for daily use.
I suspect you might already know quite a lot of the above but hope it is helpful.
Below are examples of my room measurements
Originally Posted by Macca
Thanks - I did already read some tutorials but you know what it's like - what seems straightforward on paper isn't so easy when you actually come to do it
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