Recording & acoustics
Key answers from:
How should the recording room be prepared for vocal recording?
Lukas / A dry and direct sound is definitely important when it comes to modern vocal recordings. Ideally without significant resonances or interference. Vocals with room content certainly make sense for classical or acoustic recordings, but then you need a good-sounding recording room. That means that for modern sound we need absorption above all, which ideally covers the entire frequency spectrum of the voice. You can work with gobos in larger rooms or you can make sure that the room in which you are recording is appropriately absorbent, but you need a lot of material for that.
What acoustic properties should a room have for instrument recordings?
Lukas / That‘s a completely different thing. Of course, I can record them very dry and then add artificial reverb, but that also sounds relatively artificial. But it certainly depends on the genre. Otherwise, I would always design recording rooms for instruments more vividly; instruments simply sound more real and interesting with early reflections and possibly some reverberation. Here you have to work a lot with diffusion, drum rooms in particular can also live from a louder sound, I like to work there, for example, with our PolyFusors.
Are permanent vocal booths preferable to portable absorbers?
Lukas / Singing booths are okay from my point of view, if they are big enough and have been equipped with reasonable absorption. Unfortunately, in most cases, even with most commercial products, we are dealing with small confined spaces, which are then usually only insulated with foam. This means we are dealing with a small room whose eigenmodes are in the frequency range of the voice, and our absorption material does absolutely nothing below 400 Hz. Accordingly, the vocals then sound dull, boomy and unpleasant. Either you record good vocals with gobos in a larger room or you build a larger dimensioned booth with proper broadband absorbers, everything else is always a bad compromise.
For podcasting recordings, the speakers are seated, so there I can put smaller gobos around the recording area, for example. But often podcasting rooms are equipped as a whole, so if there is regular recording here, I work on walls and ceiling as normal. There are also table absorbers to separate speakers a little bit.