Despite having throw up a heap of acoustic treatment in the studio over the last seven odd years I’ve never gotten around to properly measuring the frequency response of the room itself. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages having picked up a behringer ECM 8000 mic a while back for such a task. I was reminded of it recently while reading thru the opening chapters of Mike Seniors excellent Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio. There’s abit of work involved in setting up the calibration files both for the mic used to record the signal and the the soundcard used to converter it. The benefits thou are definitely worth the hassle; its helps you pintpoint problem frequencies in the room (so you don’t over or under compensate a frequency range while mixing) aswell as with figuring out what kind of extra treatment you might need to add-on.
There’s plenty of paid programs available for frequency testing but Room EQ Wizard by Home Theater Shack is undoubtedly the best freeware available online. Its current version (V5.0) is far easier to set-up and use than previous incarnations plus it has beta support for ASIO which worked like a charm the first time I tried it out. I ran a good few tests last Saturday using both my own calibrations and those I found in the Home Theatre Shack forums. The results were pretty varied (as you can see in the below shot) so much so that I now need to run a manual check in order to try and establish which graph is closest to the real thing. Hopefully tis the one in the middle!
