Shouldn't This Sound Boomy?


I have recently purchased a mic and I’m running REW to test my room response. These are the resulting charts:

I hear nice tight bass when I play music. I hear a big improvement over my previous speakers. The mid range and treble sound great and again the bass sounds articulate and tight. I would think this would be boomy and muddled. Unfortunately, I did not have the ability to test my previous speakers. The room is treated with GIK panels, but I have no bass traps in the corners due to the spouse approval factor. Am I a horrible listener that can’t hear this, or am I missing something else?

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Good for you! If you move around the room with the Mic you will notice the bass response changing. The peak at 25 Hz will move around. The lumpiness below 100 Hz is due to room interaction. Actually, you are not too bad. Where was the Mic positioned? You should take all measurements from the listening position. 

Next you need to run curves on each speaker individually. Ideally their response should be exactly the same. Post the results and we can talk about it. 

 

You need to decrease the vertical scale, so of course it looks flat. 🤣

So if I ignore that and look up at the waterfall plot, you have a peak around 40-50Hz I’d try to clip with an EQ and possibly raise everything below 100 up 4 dB or so because the system is looking too flat to be fun. :)  See the discussions around the Harman curves.

The duration of the bass nodes is long, but it’s also rather smooth. Besides that 40-50Hz peak you don’t have any outstanding nodes. An EQ would clean that up immediately.

Here is the same plot with dB re-scaled and smoothing changed to 1/24 for @erik_squires 😁. I have thought about an equalizer to tame that peak. I don't understand why my bass sounds as good as it does when this looks bad down low. Am I missing something when I read the waterfall? You mentioned that the duration is long but smooth. Can you explain that?

@mijostyn the graphs above were from the listening position. The mic was in the same place my head would be in.  I did run a sweep on each speaker individually at the same distance and height and volume. Here was the resulting graph, they look pretty close until you get below 20Hz. The red line is the right speaker which has no side wall. The green line is the left and it is two feet from a side wall. They are equal distant from the front wall.