“How does it look?” she asked me, a little bit apprehensive.

Rachael West is an Emmy award winning voice talent, actor, host, and model. She approaches her work with dynamic enthusiasm and an obvious passion for quality, and this project to upgrade her ISDN recording facilities was no different.

We had been working together for a few months to develop plans for a new vocal isolation booth, and truth be told, there had been a few setbacks along the way. But despite the challenges, Rachael remained committed to the project, insisting that the acoustics not be compromised.

As it turned out, the acoustics measurements on the custom isolation booth from Noise Barriers, LLC turned out even better than expected. The new level of sound isolation will allow her to focus on her voiceover work free from the distraction of outside noise. Absorption panels carefully fitted to the interior walls control sound inside the booth, and a heavy duty door with dual seals helps to keep noise out.

Only the outside remains to be painted – with a purple racing stripe, naturally!

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However, all of these measurement approaches usually involve using a loudspeaker to create the test signal. Sometimes, the sound of the loudspeaker in the room is exactly what needs to be tested. Other times, we would rather have a sound source located where musicians are located, and a loudspeaker is either not readily available or really is not the best representation of the musicians’ sound anyway…

Enter the Big Red Balloon.

This humble device has been used for direct measurement of room impulse responses for a very long time. It’s reliable, loud, highly portable, and has good frequency response way down to the 63Hz octave band when you blow them up really big.

Did we mention loud? It is important to remember hearing protection and also to be sure that anyone who might be nearby knows that it’s just a Big Red Balloon going “bang!”

Here is a fun sequence of images showing this in action:

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From previous experience in these small spaces we suspected that low frequency room modes might be involved. Room modes cause variations in sound pressure level – sometimes extreme variations – as you move through a space. When untreated, they also cause the sound to “ring” or resonate at particular frequencies that correspond to the room dimensions. In the case of Jordan’s voiceover booth, we used EASERA to measure some strong room modes in the 80-120Hz range illustrated clearly in the spectrogram plot below.

These room modes occur in the same frequency range responsible for the “boomy” sound in the booth… We are working now to help Jordan find suitable treatments to tame these low frequencies and transform the sound of his voiceover recordings!

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