DIY acoustics testing, part 3: Software
Acoustics are huge part of achieving a high quality end result in music production, and the cost of the tools used to improve the acoustics of your home studio have dropped significantly in recent years.
In this series, we’re going through all of the basics of how to run acoustics tests in a DIY setting.
In previous articles, we’ve figured out our hardware situation by purchasing an affordable, plug and play USB measurement microphone. Today, we’re going over setting up the free, open-source software we’ll use to take our measurements: RoomEQ Wizard (REW).
RoomEQ Wizard: software for measuring the acoustic response of a room.
This is Room EQ Wizard (REW), a free/open-source program that can do basic acoustics testing:
RoomEQ Wizard acoustics measurement software
Open-source software will be perfectly adequate for our purposes here: working on improving our acoustics within an existing space that’s already been built. You only need an acoustician and their fancy 3D models if you’re building new construction from the ground up. That’s not often the case in the DIY music setting.
Step 1: download this program, install it, and buy a UMIK reference mic from miniDSP.
Next, we’ll get our software talking to our hardware.
Connecting RoomEQ Wizard to the UMIK measurement microphone
Follow these steps to set up your reference mic within the REW software. It’s easy, it involves downloading and importing a few calibration files, and you only have to do it once:
Quick setup summary
1) Plug UMIK into your computer.
2) Download the calibration files for your individual mic from the MiniDSP website. Make sure you pick the right one for your situation-there’s one file for testing subwoofers and a different one for speakers.
3) Download, install, and open REW. Your UMIK should automatically be detected.
4) Load your calibration file into REW, and check the REW settings to confirm the calibration.
5) Set recording levels in the green inside REW.
6) You’re ready to run your first measurement sweep!
Next steps with RoomEQ Wizard
Once you’re set up, you can take your first acoustics measurement and generate some interesting graphs that will help you draw some conclusions. Here’s what one of those looks like:
The SPL/Phase graph inside Room EQ Wizard
Now that we’ve got both our hardware and software set up for testing, next time in this series we’ll get into how to start finding the ideal mix position inside your individual music production room.
