Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

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Aureliano
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Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by Aureliano »

Hey, I tried searching the forum for general advice on this problem and found some bits and pieces but nothing specific to my question.

So my desk is resonating really badly and I'm trying to work out the best solution. I looked online and people suggest buying or making stands and filling them sand so they've heavier and have more mass which means they resonate at a lower frequency. I've also seen people just use cinder blocks, which to me makes the most sense: cheap, really fucking heavy and you can stack them tall; plus you don't even have to 'build' it.

Another consideration for me is that I'm going to design and build myself a desk since I'm also into woodworking, in which case perhaps I can add mass to a desk by adding a concrete slab or something.

What are people here doing with their monitors?

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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by terryfalafel »

I've been looking into sorting out the acoustics of my room recently and have read a fair bit about this. A couple of things I've picked up :

- Don't put your monitors on the desk. You'll get resonance, vibration, early reflections off the desk and the speakers will most likely be too low.

- Do put them on stands. The heavier the better. Cinder block stands are ok if you don't mind how they look.

- This forum is not the best place to ask for detailed acoustic advice. If you're serious about getting a room to sound good to the point where you're thinking about building your own furniture, this isn't the best place to get the info you need. I'd start at John Sayers' forum.

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Lost to the Void
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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by Lost to the Void »

Isoacoustics monitor isolation desk stands are a very very good solution.
http://www.isoacoustics.com/products/is ... on-stands/
If you have a desk, you are going to get reflections, doesn't matter if you have stands behind or on the desk.
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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by Martin »

Lost to the Void wrote:Isoacoustics monitor isolation desk stands are a very very good solution.
http://www.isoacoustics.com/products/is ... on-stands/
If you have a desk, you are going to get reflections, doesn't matter if you have stands behind or on the desk.
Wouldnt stands, placed a bit in front of the desk, reduce the reflections from the desk by putting the monitors at an angle where most of the reflections wont hit your ears? And the reflections you instead get from the floor will (partially) be blocked by the desk?

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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by Lost to the Void »

You mean stands behind the desk?
No you still get reflections and more importantly, comb filtering from the desk.
That's why I have no desk at all in my mastering room.
Obviously impractical in a production room though.
However this is why nearfields are designed as they are, with a very direct imaging, to deal with desk reflections etc.
It's an unavoidable consequence of a conventional mixing\production room setup.
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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by Mattias »

Yep seconded what Steve says.
I also have no desk in my room, only a small table for keyboard & mouse with the speakers on Towersonic stands.
The measurements before and afters desk was actually pretty scary, relatively speaking.
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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by WOLF! »

Mattias wrote:Yep seconded what Steve says.
I also have no desk in my room, only a small table for keyboard & mouse with the speakers on Towersonic stands.
The measurements before and afters desk was actually pretty scary, relatively speaking.
I can agree on the measurements. My speakers are on stands but I do have a table (120cm x 60cm) with keyboard, mouse, 2 synths and a small controller in front of me so I needed a table for sure.
I did some extra measurements and got better result by tilting the table.

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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by Martin »

Great input since i use a temporary solution and thinking about how i should make a desk for my studio, thanks! Will make i really small desk then.

May i hijack the thread further and ask if you have any thoughts or solutions to how you place your computer monitor with regards to acoustics?

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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by Root »

Sessiondesk say they build acoustically optimized and modular desks: http://www.sessiondesk.com/

Looks great, even if i haven't seen one for real yet.
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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by innovine »

Lost to the Void wrote:It's an unavoidable consequence of a conventional mixing\production room setup.
Any thoughts on having the mixer located off to one side, and sitting in the sweet spot with your favorite synth, sequencer or computer in the center instead? For those who spend more time on those than straight mixing...?

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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by Lost to the Void »

innovine wrote:
Lost to the Void wrote:It's an unavoidable consequence of a conventional mixing\production room setup.
Any thoughts on having the mixer located off to one side, and sitting in the sweet spot with your favorite synth, sequencer or computer in the center instead? For those who spend more time on those than straight mixing...?
Well, the standard layout of a production room is to have the desk in front of you is a practical one right. Traditionally a recording, production studio, all the work is done on the desk. Nearfields were developed to sit on the bridge of mixing desks, bringing the sound closer than the mains and reducing problems with reflections etc from the desk, particularly for mid range focus.
And that set the model for how everyone sets up their rooms.
Wherever you set up your gear in a production room, it`s hard surfaces. Keyboards, mixing desks, modules, computers, monitors etc. So if you put it to the side you might reduce comb filtering but then change your stereo imaging/timing.

You have to just accept that and learn to work with it. It`s impractical to have a production room like a Katz style mastering room (most mastering rooms don`t even do this, they have desks to the front too, katz is just an uber uber perfectionist, and I decided if I was going to model someone, I would model the best in the game).
My own production room is fairly conventional, keys (midi) in front of me on desk, with speakers behind, mixer off to the left with other gear.

I mean, you do your best to dampen the problems in your room, point your monitors right in the sweet spot, and make your mix decisions from that sweet spot.
Then when you want titanic sonic purity, you fling your music over to a mastering studio, where someone like me can really throw a microscope over the mix.

In mastering we need more accuracy because we generally only get to work on a stereo file. So every single thing we do to the audio, effects everything else, essentially everything we do is destructive, and we try to minimise that destructiveness. But you really need to be able to hear what making a quarter db boost on a medium Q at 1200hz is doing because you are effecting everything that has presence in that area.
In mixing you can isolate the channel/instrument where the problem is, and deal with that problem in isolation, so you can get away with less insane accuracy in your monitoring.


Where am I going with this?

Essentially, when I comment on stuff like this, I am usually coming at it from a very nerdy, fussy perfectionist perspective, which I don`t think it is bad to aspire to perfection. I spend much much more time in the mastering studio than the production room. I`m 9-6 every day in the mastering room, so my perspective is skewed in that direction now.
So bare that in mind when I go off about nearfield monitors or whatever, I`m coming at it from a very high fidelity perspective.


Don`t worry too much about desk reflections and comb filtering etc basically, it becomes more of an issue at higher volume, but I assume most of you are working at reasonable levels and you should be able to adjust for these problems. This is why I always recommend monitors with very direct imaging and super fast transient response (such as the presonus sceptres) as you reduce early reflection problems and stuff like desk comb filtering.

I mean, this is my mastering room from the listening spot.
Image

Well actually it`s changed, there is now a 50 inch monitor in there so the monitor is way behind the speakers now
Image Image

So yeah, utter audio purity, but it would be a shit room for producing in.
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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by WOLF! »

Martin wrote:how you place your computer monitor with regards to acoustics?
Bought a 82cm TV screen so I can place the screen as far as possible behind the speakers.
I'm certainly not in the same league as void and I only have one room so I try to make the best off it.
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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by Aureliano »

Thanks everyone for the replies, I learnt more than I expected!

I have another problem I'm trying to deal with that isn't related to this and not broadly interesting enough to warrant starting a new thread.
One of my monitors has started sounding raspy when playing low frequencies. I've swapped wires, swapped monitor positions... at low volume it's not audible, but I'm talking really low, when you turn the monitors up a bit and play a low note it makes this raspy, undefined sound. I was losing my mind trying to work out what was wrong. I opened up the back and had a look inside to see if anything was resting against the cone, couldn't find anything. Last night I put my face right up to the cone to compare the difference between the monitors: the working monitor pushes air from a central, defined position; the faulty monitor pushes air hard from the top seal of the cone, about 1 inch long. Is this the source of the problem?

A bit of backstory to these monitors: I bought these Genelecs M040s B-Stock, when they arrived there was something knocking about inside one. I opened it up and the transformer's plastic mount had snapped off the back plate of the monitor. The transformer is pretty hefty so it's obvious the monitor had been dropped at some point, causing the plastic mount inside to snap. However it's just where the back plate holds the transformer, without it the transformer just rests inside and doesn't vibrate or make a noise resting on a little cushion. The sound of both speakers were seemingly identical to me at that time and the faff of trying to get it all sorted when I wanted to fly back to Istanbul from the UK soon with them made me decide to do nothing about it, despite feeling pretty pissed off one of the monitors was in this state. Anyway, this is the monitor that is now giving me problems with low end sound. Could the cone seal/mounting have finally come loose after all this time? I really have no idea but if someone here has any thoughts before I begin the mission of taking them to the Genelec distributors here and having them sent away for a long time I'd be more than grateful!

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Re: Desk is resonating badly, do I need stands?

Post by Lost to the Void »

Could be the cone but unfortunately it sounds like a problem with the amp. It's a cheap replacement job luckily if that is that case. Could be the driver seal but you'd more likely be able to see the problem.
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