Room Tuning, Knowing the Note.
Most of what you will do in room tuning is about tone and the frequency domain and not attack. Knowing what you can affect and what you can’t, or shouldn’t, will help you make good choices. Before you spend a lot of time chasing the room-tune-timbre around the room, understand where in the note you're listening. Okay, piano for reference and keeping it simple but still useful—attack, sustain, decay.
When a piano key is struck, three main characteristics of a note are set in motion—attack, sustain and the decay. The attack of a struck piano note is the impinging hammer, initial string motion and moment of coupling of piano body—the first few milliseconds of the yet-to-form note. The attack contains the detail to process sound prominence—direction, amplitude, character, intelligence. Attack gets our attention, both conscience and non-conscience, and seems to be processed in the primitive part of our brain much more so than the frontal lobes. While attack is almost just an impulse, it informs much of the emotional reaction to what comes next. To really hear what is going on in the attack seems to require the dialing back of our voluntary thinking, allowing the back of our brain to lead.
To recreate the attack is solely a function of the playback system, mostly the loudspeakers, and has little to do with the room. You might scab something together that’s close to a cure but you cannot fix attack problems with room tuning. To fix or change the attack is the domain of the temporal, ideally improvements to the loudspeaker, but sometimes with dynamic compressors and other transient and timing based in-the-box processing.
ATTACK GIVING WAY TO SUSTAIN - Related to the attack but carrying into the sustain are the secondary transients, here is where the note takes form, and this is where those that can’t turn off their thinking brain start to hear differences. If you have electrically equalized your system (cables included) and have not taken into consideration attack characteristics, or you’ve used acoustic objects in your room to unwittingly tune attack issues, your playback system is very likely sounding weird.
SUSTAIN & DECAY - The vast majority of people are highly sensitive to the sustain and decay of a note and music generally, sustain is the body that gives attack context—(or is it the other way around.) With steady-state or semi steady-state music or signal, the room’s influence is huge. Nearly all of the musical power is contained in this region, and the room really amplifies it. In fact, most of the sound you hear is the result of the room.
Without realizing, people usually tweak things to get the steady-state, the sustain, tonally correct which inadvertently kills the life in the attack, and sometimes the decay. This is a reason why cables as tone control, digital room correction, parametric equalizers and the like don’t fix fundamental time and dynamic range problems. When the sustain runs out of power there is the transition into the decay. How your room sounds and how the speakers work within it dominate the front-side of decay, sometimes swamping the sublets that flourish in the quiet shadows.
(One Day I’ll Get It Right by Cracker playing in the background)