Acoustic treatment is an enormously complex subject – it is physics after all.
To go into anything more than a fundamental level for this article would be both prohibitively difficult to write (book-length) and ludicrously dense with formulas, graphs and specific scientific language.
For this guide, I will be focusing on the practicalities of acoustic treatment in a vocal booth and highlighting the acoustic principles behind these treatments in the simplest possible way.
First up, let’s go over some general acoustic principles, tips & tricks.
Acoustic principles
Many people seem to be under the impression that you need to create a completely dead room with absolutely no reflections—drastic overkill! You don’t need to create an anechoic chamber.
Audio and the human voice always exist within an actual physical space. Incorporating some space into the recording, even if it is a voice of God documentary narration, is vital for quality and natural sound—and is even more critical for listening environments, especially if you are engaging in broadcast level mixing and editing.
The price of acoustic treatment can change drastically based on what you’ve already got to hand and whether you intend to buy acoustic panels. Pricing is also affected by whether you are going all out for sound-proofing or more rudimentary acoustic treatment.
As such, we’ll categorise the options as:
- LOW: less than £150 / €150 / $200
- MID : less than £500 / €500 / $550
- HIGH: more than £/€/$500
Anyway – to business! Let’s have a look at some home studio setups submitted by our incredible community of voice actors.
Harrison’s low-priced setup
This is about as homemade as you can get – and it’s perfectly fine.
A recording from this ‘room’ will probably sound better than 75% of other half-done home studio environments that haven’t been treated properly.
Harrison very wisely realised that the computer needs to be outside the duvet fort – otherwise, the whir of the fan will be one of the loudest things on the recording. You’d be surprised how many people bring the laptop in with them.
However, there are a couple of significant downsides to a set-up like this. The primary one being it will get hot in there very quickly.
For a duvet fort to be an effective acoustic treatment option, it needs to be covered all the way around; this doesn’t only trap the sound, the air gets trapped, and it quickly heats up with a human body in the room.
Also, you can’t show a studio like this to paying customers. Most Skype live direction is done audio-only but if the client insists on video, they may not be thrilled seeing the voice artist recording in a duvet fort rather than a proper studio (even though it’s acceptable).
Squeakycheese Productions low to mid-priced environment
Squeakycheese Productions is an excellent example of some other aspects of acoustic treatment and points out some potential issues.
This studio has excellent acoustic treatments, using acoustic diffusion panels in key locations but not covered the entire wall. It’s a complete waste of money covering the whole wall since reflections that are hitting the diaphragm of the microphone off-axis (basically indirectly) will go through many other scattering and diffusion effects from other objects in the room before returning to the microphone.
Only the direct lines at the microphone level need to be worried about unless you are in an empty, tiny, cubic room.
The SE Reflexion Filter will help prevent reflections and make the room’s size generally smaller sounding. However, it’s open at the top and bottom in this setup. This means there is a risk of direct on-axis reflections above and below the microphones. There is only a very thin carpet below the microphones, and although we can’t see the ceiling, it’s unlikely to have treatment. A few extra diffusion panels will quickly fix this, though, and it will not require completely re-designing the studio!
Mike’s mid-priced setup
Mike’s studio is a fine example of a largely homemade well-treated home studio to show you that acoustic treatment for voice-over doesn’t cost the earth.
Mike has used office dividers (which have a certain amount of acoustic treatment), covered them in duvets, then suspended one above them.
The use of duvets around the microphone and performer will absorb most reflections. The use of something that looks very much like the SE Reflexion Filter alongside this duvet based acoustic treatment ensures the microphone will sound great with very few reflections but still natural. Over-treatment can make the room sound ‘artificially’ small – boxy and unpleasant.
One key thing Mike has done that many neglect is to treat the area above the microphone acoustically. There are reflections from the floor to ceiling, just as there are from the walls. Leaving out the dampening above the microphone will make a Reflexion filter and the acoustic treatment on the walls largely redundant.
Inthe case of acoustic treatment – a job half done is a job you might as well not have even started!
Joyce’s mid-priced studio
Joyce has a great studio with a room within a room. She’s covered the inside of the small squared-off room with diffusion / dampening panels.
This is good so far, but it gets even better when you realise she has specific corner bass traps too! Hooray!
Corners are bad for forming something called a standing wave at low frequencies, making the voice-over recording muddier and less pleasing to the ear. Having some specific wedge-shaped sound dampening panels in the corner will help, particularly in a small booth set-up like this.
However, every room is different and every room will have different frequencies that they resonate.
Think of the standing wave as the wavelength that ‘fills’ the room.
For example, you have a room with a set of speakers at one end and a flat wall opposite it. Everything will reflect off that flat wall, but there will be one frequency (and its associated harmonics) that will perfectly fit the size of the room.
These are the specific frequencies that need treating, and corners are notoriously bad for causing this problem.
There are various types of bass traps made from other materials. Whether you get a porous or non-porous material may depend on the intensity of the standing wave in the room.
You may notice that some bass traps are flat and are intended to be placed diagonally across the corner, leaving an air gap to take advantage of the ‘quarter wavelength rule’ —thus enabling you to reduce low frequencies with large wavelengths by taking up less space.
Ok, that’s a ludicrously basic version of the facts, but it’s a close enough description!
In any case, Joyce’s simple corner foam pads will work well for their purpose, i.e. a small vocal booth where the standing waves are unlikely to be too disruptive based on the limited frequency range of a human voice.
Joyce’s setup is likely to be within the mid-priced range, although the quality of the corner bass traps seems relatively high, and some brands can be expensive!
Aimee’s mid to high priced acoustic treatment
Aimee sent in this picture of her recently created vocal booth, with ingenious screen mirroring.
This studio looks indistinguishable from most professional studio environments in terms of acoustic treatment.
As I mentioned above, the only time you need to have acoustic panelling/diffusion covering every square inch of wall is when you have a completely square recording room—which is the case here.
These panels are relatively inexpensive, but getting hundreds will add up! Creating a little booth and covering the interior of that with diffusers to prevent the most unpleasant reflections is the perfect solution.
The foam panels on the walls behind the speakers in the listening environment are probably a bit overkill. It would make more sense to have the diffusion panels on the wall opposite the speakers, behind the listener, to reduce reflections from there. The reason to move the speakers away from the wall is similar to the motivation to record further away from the microphone—the boundary effect.
Again this is complicated but basically – it causes some sound waves to be obliterated through phase cancellation and others to be artificially boosted through similar phase properties. Suffice it to say:
Move the speakers away from the wall and put the diffusion behind your head.
Mark’s swanky high-priced setup
Mark has an Esmono booth. I’m not sure of the exact specification of his one or how much it cost Mark (I’m not that nosey), but the prices start from GBP 6,000.
Which quickly puts this setup in the high-price bracket!
In terms of sound isolation and internal acoustic treatment, this booth provides everything you need – it enables Mark to stand further away from the microphone and project his voice without loads of unpleasant reflections.
As previously mentioned, any reflections can make the recording sound boxy, and it’s great not having to worry about that. The only thing we’d change about Mark’s set up is the speaker situation – never put stuff on top of your speakers.
The speakers generate sound waves in the air by vibrating. That means they will vibrate whatever you put on top of them, too, such as ornaments or plants, especially at higher loudness levels.
It’s a great setup, though and if you’ve got the cash and don’t want to go through the hassle of building an entire room within a room and calculating the acoustic specifications for the booth. You can’t go wrong with these Esmono booths (other brands are also available).
So, there you have it!
You’ve got three potential price points, but all of the studios here have something in common: they are all, to varying degrees, a room within a room — even the duvet fort (which I love).
Suppose you want to record a voice-over in a bigger space. In that case, you will need to invest in soundproofing and acoustically treating the entire perimeter of that room – essentially by building a room within a room. This expense puts you in the realm of building an actual recording studio. A far more considerable investment of time and energy. Nevertheless, the broad acoustic principles still apply. Here’s a summary of the key points:
- DO: create a room within a room by using one of the methods above
- DO: be aware of reflections behind, above and below (as well as the more obvious ones)
- DO: try and avoid recording in an empty square room – books and clothes are perfect acoustic dampeners!
- DON’T: overdo it with foam diffusion pads – only use in particularly reflective areas
- DON’T: spend a fortune if you can’t afford it. Just observe the basic principles of acoustics, and you’ll be fine.
5 Tips For Perfect Microphone Technique
More from this author
Sometimes we include links to online retail stores such as Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, if you click on a link and make a
purchase, we may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.
