Acoustic Measurements Part 1

Understand and improve the sound of your room

The concept sounds tempting: simply record a test signal with a microphone and tune the frequency response of your room until it’s linear.

In reality, however, it’s not that easy to optimise your room in a meaningful way after the initial measurement.

What can beginners do to to improve their listening situation, if they don’t have a huge budget or a lot of experience? What can ambitious engineers do to achieve a perfect mixing and mastering condition?

First of all, you should be aware that no measurement can replace detailed and critical listening. Even if your system is set up in the best possible way, it might not suit your personal listening preferences and therefore, you might not achieve great results. However, measurements can make a lot of sense in addition to listening to music that you’re very familiar with, in order to calibrate your speakers.

Since acoustic measurements and room optimisation are very complex topics, we want to show you two different approaches. The first section (HOFA BASIC) is about measuring the frequency response at the listening position in order to adjust the speaker setup. This is called “calibration”.

Since this is most effective when a room is acoustically optimised, we want to talk about more complex acoustic measurements and their evaluation and optimisation in the second section (HOFA PRO).