John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

I was wondering if there is a program that let's you test a room in a virtual environment?

For example you have a room design. You enter the material type of the walls. You place a source of sound anywhere within the room. The program shows you the wave paths, the accumulations, the nulls, the standing waves, etc. That would be sooooo useful.

Please say yes.

There's a bunch here:
http://forum.studiotips.com/viewforum.php?f=27
You'll need to be logged in to access them.

I've been using the Chris Whealy calcs. which are ffffiiine


not quite wave paths and stuff, but general absorbtion and reflection stuff.

Wave paths would be confusing I think seeing as a sound wave propogates in a complex 3D scatter from any point it hits. I've been using raytracing in Maya for checks of a single bounce, but its only really a rough guideline for direct lines, anything more than that I figure it's not much use. Raytracing works the wrong way round really.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

http://www.cara.de/ENU/cara-powerpack.html

For $69 Euro, this is exactly what you asked for; best bargain in the known universe, with a warning; be prepared to spend a LOT of time with this, it's DEEP and has its own CAD interface to learn before you can "build" your environment. The video tutorials will give you a jump start, but plan on a few DAYS of messing with it.

Still, a very useful program - I've still not found enough time to figure it all out, beyond knowing what's possible (but I'm always spread thinner than I should be)

Check it out... Steve

thanks