If you work from home as a musician, voice actor, streamer, or podcaster, you know how difficult it is to get studio-quality sound from your home set-up. You’ve invested hundreds of dollars and hours into creating a home recording booth. And yet, road noise leaks in, there’s an echo you can’t shake, and it sounds like you’re recording in the world’s tiniest closet.
It’s not the microphone, and you have loads of soundproofing measures, so what gives? Well, it could be that you haven’t diffused the sound enough.
Why should you use a sound diffuser in your space? Here are 3 reasons that you may not have considered.
1. You Need Your Room to Sound Larger
Let’s face it: If you’re recording music, you don’t want it to sound like you recorded it in a tiny basement room or a closet. Live performances, especially musical ones, don’t tend to sound good in a dead, small space.
A sound diffuser can also make a dramatic difference to your listening experience if you have a home theater, making it feel more like the cinema. Since sound diffuser panels and structures take sound waves and scatter them, it gives the space more life than it may otherwise have.
These, along with sound reflectors, are part of what make live auditoriums such an incredible performance environment.
2. Your Room Echoes Too Much
Another reason you might want to find ways to diffuse sound is that your room echoes too much. Even if you treat your home studio space with sound absorption materials, there may still be live spots with hard walls where sound will bounce right back at you. This manifests as an echo on your recording, which can be annoying to fix in-post and impossible to address live.
Any treatment of this kind, DIY sound diffuser or store-bought, can help reduce echo in your recordings.
3. Sound Diffusers Can Block Sounds from Escaping
Last but not least, well-placed sound diffusers can prevent sounds that you don’t want escaping a room from entering another place. This can help block the noise from school bells, fire alarms, and other loud sounds that you don’t want interfering with your recording.
If you live in a busy area, especially one near small children, you may want to consider investing in both sound diffusion and sound absorption technologies. One or the other may not be enough to keep things quiet while you record, but both in combination can work wonders.
A Sound Diffuser Can Improve Your Recording Quality Immensely
Purchasing a sound diffuser can work wonders for your listening and recording experience. It can scatter potential echoes, liven up a space that’s too dead to record in, and help prevent the noise of the outside world from interfering with your work or relaxation. Whether you buy one for yourself or attempt a DIY solution, diffusion can resolve many of your sound quality issues.
Did you find this guide to sound diffusion helpful? Would you like to learn more about acoustics or home studio set-ups in general? If so, then check out the Lifestyle section of our blog today for more articles like this one.
