Pictures from the event.
Mr. Smith opened the event by introducing himself and thanking all of those who had come out to the meeting. As the event began, he pulled out a piece of paper, advising those in attendance that, when speaking in public, it's always important to begin with a joke. Reading one from his sheet of paper, he looked up to see the bemused expressions of the audience before moving on to describe what his company does (acoustic treatment of rooms and other spaces) and listing some of his higher profile clients, including Lynard Skynard, Nine Inch Nails, other higher-end bands and studios, police stations, and even the US Government. He began to stress how even rich and famous people face many of the same acoustic problems that everyone else faces, and he told the audience that he would like to speak about the different recording and mixing spaces that students in attendance have to deal with and talk about ways to treat those spaces.
Afterwards, he began discussing the importance of trusting professional advice as opposed to advice of non-professionals and people on the internet. He also mentioned how, for most smaller projects, Auralex is willing to provide free consultations in order to help people make acoustically honest spaces; some of these free resources include Personalized Room Analysis, an Interactive Kit Calculator, and several different websites, listed at the end of the summary. He also briefly mentioned Auralex's new RLX app, available for iPhones and Android devices.
After talking about many of the resources Auralex offered, Mr. Smith began to talk about why acoustic treatment is necessary, listing time domain, phase issues, and frequency filtering caused by the environment as different issues that cause acoustic "lies" in playback. He noted that reflected sound is meant to be a tool, used at appropriate times, rather than the primary sound in a recording. He also noted that the way that Auralex often does acoustics is very practical, and how (in his opinion) the measurement of rooms is often unnecessary in the acoustic treatment of rooms. Digressing slightly, he also stressed the importance of situational awareness, talking about how it's very important to know when one can be informal and relaxed and when one must be reserved and professional.
He also compared the process of acoustic treatments to visiting the eye doctor, discussing how it's important to be able to compare one sound to another and make a critical decision on which is better and which is worse. He gave several reasons as to why it's important to fix the acoustics of a room, talking about the importance of not needing to worry about how the room is changing the sound being recorded. He noted the importance of fixing your room before going all-out on buying equipment, saying "You just spent $____ on a brand new ______. How much of that would you like to hear?" He also stressed the differences between acoustic treatment and "soundproofing," citing mass and material types, air containment and location, and the floating/sealing of materials and their locations as the 3 main factors. He stressed the ideas that proper sound isolation gains you better sound, and also how absorbers alone are not enough to soundproof your space.
He then talked about the materials that Auralex uses, discussing how they use specialized rubber materials and StopGapTM acoustical sealant to seal up the room as if they were trying to make it water-tight. He also discussed the importance of proper wall construction between rooms to seal the sound into a space, noting how it's important to have physical isolation between layers of drywall and different thicknesses to give them different resonant frequency fingerprints, noting how just adding more drywall can often detract from a room's acoustic isolation and treatment. He also discussed retrofitting pre-built rooms to make them more acoustically sound. He listed a number of different products that Auralex uses to treat rooms both new and all, including absorbers, diffusers, bass traps, floaters, sound barriers, and ancillary products, using them to provide the best sound in any type of space.
He also listed the three types of room modes (peaks in response): axial, where the sound touches two room surfaces, tangential, where the sound touches 4 surfaces, and oblique, where the sound touches every surface in the room. He also mentioned the opposing room nodes, or dips in frequency response. He particularly mentioned church spaces, citing how some in the audience may end up working church audio, saying "The masses need to hear the word to heed it." Mr. Smith also emphasized caution when looking at numbers and projections provided by even some higher-profile companies, as the statistics and test data posted by some companies are often made up or embellished in order to cast the products in a better light.
He also mentioned that what really matters is the sound that microphones in a space pick up, and how room ambience is generally for the benefit of performers rather than the microphones. He also discussed how there is nothing any room or any acoustical device can do to improve the accuracy of the original sound, and how the room can only harm the faithfulness of the sound emanating from the monitors. He further discussed how the best listening area is roughly 18 inches before the monitors' lines of sight converge, as this location provides the most accurate sound and stereo image. Mr. Smith also discussed how even acoustical devices can have a resonant frequency, and how these devices are called "active devices," and how these active acoustical devices can come back to bite you when it comes to the sound of the room.
As the presentation went on, Mr. Smith began to show off some specific products that Auralex offers, including their most popular bass trap and their brand new Studio6TM Bass Traps (which they introduced at the recent NAM event), which features a reverse-bevel cut, allowing the traps to be inserted directly into the corners of rooms. He also described some of the irregularly shaped spaces that he has had to work with, which mostly consisted of home and public theaters. He also discussed some more creative uses of spaces in rented or purchased homes, such as turning attics or garages into bass traps. He called attention to some of the more affordable, easy-to-install products that Auralex offers, talking about how they can be used to make even seemingly acoustically undesirable spaces sound excellent, as in the case of GRAMMY Nominee Ben Cooper's home studio. At the end of the presentation, there was a raffle giving away a pair of MoPAD monitor isolators, won by the lucky owner of ticket B103, Reese Westerhoff. After the raffle, the lecture was dismissed, and Mr. Smith displayed some flyers for some of the other products Auralex introduced at NAMM.
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