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I don’t know about “harmful” but agree that playing a tuba inside a Wenger practice room is far from ideal.

However, consider the purpose. They were never intended to be optimal acoustics environments. They are designed to contain sound within that room - that’s the whole point of them, not to be mini concert halls. They usually get installed in schools and similar institutions where they are clustered together in sets of multiple rooms. Several people can then play at the same time and not really bother each other but also not bother those on the outside of the room. Not bothering those OUTSIDE of the room really seems to be the primary reason these exist. User experience then trails behind.

I have always sought out the largest indoor space possible for practice at a given location, but sometimes choices are limited. Wenger rooms are better than nothing, for sure. I’ve spent plenty of time in them!

Did you carry a zero?

A small practice room is 6x8 or so. That’s 48 square feet. Basically $15,000. Scale up from there.

Everyone knows these are a compromise. Further, it only takes a few calculations to figure out the ideal size of a room for tuba resonance. (Hint: it’s a big room.)

Even the non-stuffed-with-batting rooms stink. I did most of my practice time outside or in the rehearsal hall. That meant getting to school early and/or staying late. Price to be paid.

ETA (edited to add):

These rooms typically don’t contain low frequencies well. The acoustic dampening material has a steep roll off as frequency drops into the tuba range. Probably 6db per octave or so. So for people outside the room, a tuba is still audible. If you’re in an adjacent room, the tuba will still carry. If you’re a couple rooms down it’s probably still audible via a shared plenum or other resonant space, but not so much it’s a bother.

Whatever, they aren’t designed for low frequency instruments. That’s obvious from the typical size alone.

smileatom wrote:Better math, but my point is its a negative. It's entire purpose is to kill sound. And *our* entire purpose is to make great sound.

How many facilities are really buying these up and using them?

Well, you’re starting to answer your own question.

Cheap (state) schools and military bands are often run by administrators and committees. These groups make decisions off of budgets and marketing before things like practicality.

Further, when you’re in the military and in charge of spending funds, you want to spend all you been allotted or even more. That’s the typical modus operandi there.

I’m not saying these are good decisions, rather the decisions are made by motivating forces that aren’t music or art. Heck, I’m pretty sure Wenger developed this to answer the mail, not based solely on innovation. The fact that these things haven’t changed in 25 years or so (those hall effects have been around since the 90s at least) tells me no one really cares.

I think most of us would agree that they are generally useless. Most practice rooms are. Sometimes it was fun to sign out a room and make the point that a tuba player stuck in a tiny room clustered around others was not great for anyone. I’d get knocks on the door about lowering the volume, requesting another time, or being told to leave by a faculty member so that their students could have “quiet”. It sucked. So I, being concerned about tone, intonation, and technique like you are, happily wandered outside or into a sufficiently large space to practice.

I’m guessing most everyone else did the same when opportunity allowed.

Well, I think you can generalize that statement into: “all small practice rooms”.

I understand your frustration completely. All I can say is that I personally know professional players that had to sneak around and find spots to “open up” to ensure that the tone they were producing was correct. It sucks. A lot.

On the flip side, at least when you land an orchestra gig, you don’t have to play the viola part.

Matt G wrote:n the flip side, at least when you land an orchestra gig, you don’t have to play the viola part.

smileatom wrote: As a musician, I really believe these things are harmful as they destroy any meaningful feedback loop.

Is that really the case? Or do they just alter the transfer function?

The sound from behind the bell on any instrument is not the sound an audience hears, but over time we learn the correlation. We learn to produce a sound that represents the sound we need to play.

The sound we hear is part bell radiation, part bounce off wall, maybe part room resonance, etc. Playing in a cathedral adds reverb, playing in a carpet factory reduces it, and it's necessary to figure out how to play regardless.

People who play loud gigs wear hearing protection, and they can't hear their actual sound, but they learn an alternate sound that when produced will correlate with the desired output.

An anecdote: when I was in high school, I had a speech impediment, a lisp. I could not produce a correct "s" sound.

I worked with a speech therapist to produce this weird noise that sounded nothing like an s to my ears, but he assured me it really was. I began substituting it for the S I had been using - this was a long process as i added it to more words but eventually I made it work - but it did not sound like an S to me. Over time my perception of it changed and I now do hear it as an S. But at the time i had to make the connection that Sound X in my ears is Sound Y to somebody else's, so if I want to produce Sound Y, I must try for Sound X. Isn't that the same thing we do as musicians?

What I don't get is that soundproofing and deadening the acoustics inside the room serve two different functions and require separate treatments--maybe even wholly separate treatments. Sound can reflect inside the room all you want and still not escape, or it can seem as dead as playing inside a feather pillow and still entertain that end of town.

I recall stories by Roger Russell, the acclaimed designer of loudspeakers for McIntosh. McIntosh had two rooms they used to evaluate their speakers--the typical anechoic chamber, which absorbs as much sound as possible so that the speaker can be measured in isolation, and a "reverberant room", which reflects as much sound as possible to evaluate the interaction between the speaker and the environment. They reckoned both were equally important. But my point is that neither of these rooms allowed much sound to escape the chamber. Both had concrete walls and were wrapped in absorbent materials. Of course, their objective was not to keep people from hearing what goes on inside, but rather to keep ambient outside noise from leaking in and ruining their tests.


McIntosh Labs reveberant room (from Roger Russell's online history). Note the hard floor and walls, and the omnidirectional test microphone. You'll certainly hear yourself in this room. This is a soundproof room.


McIntosh Labs anechoic chamber (ibid). Note the reflection traps on all six inside walls, and the "floor" of wire mesh to be as acoustically unreflective as possible. This room will make you wonder what sound you are putting out. This is also a soundproof room.

Radio studios likewise. To soundproof them (which protects the booth from outside noise), they build walls so that inside and outside surfaces are not coupled with elastic (i.e., solid) materials. They use offset studs, and fill cavities with damping material. They build windows with two panes, one at an incline from the other so they can't couple acoustically. They use fully damped airflow baffles for air conditioning and return air. But to kill echo and reverberation inside the studio, they line the walls with Sonex egg-crate damping foam, the design of which traps reflections. But sound will go through that Sonex and hardly slow down on its way.

So, I wonder what objective Wenger is trying to attain by making the rooms dead, when the way they sell them is based on their being soundproof.

Rick "who has never played in a Wenger practice room, but thinks their music stands also don't attain the objective of holding the music at the height specified by the user" Denney

I never heard of such things, for that price, I’d want it do double as a sauna!!

If these things were any good at all
...Trumpet world would have portable practice facilities
.... a bass drum case with wrist and neck cuts


ps they buy anything

bloke wrote:

smileatom wrote:Resonance and vibration are desirable qualities....

vvvvVVVVVVvvvvvvvVVVVVVV....

Yeah...The silver piston C tubas didn't do it, but the lacquered rotary ones in Bb did.

A really sharp low Bb resonates at the same frequency as fluorescent lights. I'm surprised they didn't simply shatter, spraying mercury-laden powder on hapless tuba players. The only saving grace was that those who played that sharp (50 cents) probably didn't have any fundamental in the sound, or much in the way of overtones.

Rick "trying at present to track down that hum in his mixing board " Denney

smileatom wrote:I think Wenger deadens them because they are usually very small in actual installations, although they can be made into a quintet or larger sized room like at War Memorial backstage. If they were live in such a small space you would blow your head off, but since the actual goal is soundproofing the exterior, the interior really is just not important. It puts you in your place for sure.

It’s also a heckuva lot easier to convince people how well these things “work” by making them acoustically dead inside. The average person would have to suspend disbelief if they were presented a resonant room that was acoustically isolated from the outside. The observer can’t occupy the inside and outside at the same time.

Point being, these are engineered to answer a question (mentioned before) and do so with convincing marketing.

bloke wrote:Maybe, it's sorta like the "short-action" gimmick with sousaphones.

band directors: "Short-action...That's GOT to be better...PLUS they cost a lot, so..."

Yup. In the case of Conn short action valves, you’ve got an increased valve diameter that requires an offset stem that then requires the additional pin to help with valve motion in the casing. It’s touted as marvelous engineering in the Conn catalogs, when the standard “put the stem in the center of a normal sized valve” is the optimal solution.

If only Rube Goldberg were alive now. He’d be a marketing and engineering genius.

During my last 10 years in NY, I was an adjunct tuba instructor at Five Towns College. We had to teach lessons in these Wenger rooms. After trying that, I told the director of brass and private lessons that this was impossible. It was bad enough with one tuba in there and not being able to get proper feedback. But, with 2 tubas, it was almost impossible. Plus, we didn’t fit in there. I told him I needed another place to teach and he said there weren’t any. I told him the stage in the concert hall was usually not being used. He said that the director (president) of the school forbids teaching there and that if I did teach there and he found out, he would fire me on the spot. I didn’t give a crap. So, I began teaching there. One day, in walks the president. He says, tuba lessons, eh (with his hands on his hips)? I said that’s right and he walked out. No more Wenger rooms.

I played in one of these - I think at the Kennedy Center - that had internal microphones / speakers and sound processing that made the booth have the apparent acoustic properties of a church, a concert hall - there were several presets. It was one of the coolest pieces of musical technology I've ever experienced. Were money no object whatsoever it would be a neat thing to have. Sadly, as it pertains to this instance, money is still an object.

I absolutely don't like the Wenger rooms. And, I'm surprised not has mentioned it, I find it difficult to breathe in these rooms. The air re-circulation/quality is not good

bloke wrote:By the same token, Yamaha Silent Brass...yes?

I’m not familiar with the current generation.

The prior generation definitely had a processing lag in the DSP. I’d imagine a lot of that has been fixed in the newer generation.