Los Angeles, CA (February 20, 2024)—“I remember when we first did the speaker test and we were tuning the room: There was a ring that was so deafening,” Jaycen Joshua recalls. “If you turned it up loud, the pressure was crazy.”
PAD had designed for additional bass trapping across the ceiling to achieve Joshua’s requested linear response from front to back in the mix room, but this was unexpected. Malekpour elaborates, “I was getting, I want to say, 10 dB extension beyond 20 Hz, from 40 to 10 Hz, starting to rise at 12 dB per octave. I said, ‘This is weird! What’s going on?’ At one point, we opened the door and suddenly the sound pressure went away. I started measuring, and it was what I thought—the front corners were really having a problem.”
PAD’s initial design had called for a wide-open front wall with the speakers mounted in it, but Joshua asked for an alcove in each corner. Malekpour’s initial thoughts? “I said, ‘Listen, they’re going to fire low frequency at us, and we’re not going to love it.’”
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“I wanted these alcoves because they made the room look bigger and deeper,” Joshua explains, “so I was like, ‘We spent all this money and it sounds like this—and it’s my fault!’ Dave said, ‘Give me two seconds’ and he put bass traps in each of those corners.”
Malekpour found that a single Jocavi bass trap in each alcove solved the issue. “By moving them in or out of the cavity, I could vary the amount of bass absorption in a really accurate way, as if it was an EQ,” he says. “We measured the response, taped them off, and said, ‘That’s where they go.’ We encased the traps with wood and put the fabric on them and now they look like stands for Jaycen’s Bearbricks.”
“Now it’s the best-sounding room in the city,” Joshua adds, proudly.
