The Truth about Acoustic Treatments and Monitoring

I do a lot of tracking and engineering at my home project studio. If you're reading this, you probably know that already. When I first started out, my monitoring situation (and the room I was working in) didn't sound that great. When I would get a mix sounding the way I liked it, it would never translate the same once I listened to it in the car. I found that I had to compensate and "guess" as to weather or not the levels were correct.

A few years ago, I bought a room analyzer that help me figure out what frequencies were being altered by the dimensions and inherent nature of my room. This product (now discontinued for some reason) was called the DBX Driverack Studio module. After sculpting a custom EQ graph, I was amazed at how much clearer everything sounded.

Why are most home studios "acoustically challenged?" Well, the main reason has to do with the nature of sound. It travels in waves. It travels in different sizes. Sound zings all over a room when there are reflective surfaces (such as bare walls). And, certain frequencies can cancel themselves out depending on how big the room is and at what angle everything is being set up at. In short, the environment in which you monitor your mixes and engineering greatly affects your judgement.

I am beginning to record bands in my project studio. I have a few rooms in my house with really high ceilings...the rooms are also really big. Being so, I decided to invest in some Freeport Acoustic Panels, made by Primacoustic. I intended to keep them out in the garage and use them as needed. When they arrived, just for kicks, I put them behind my studio monitors to see if they would make a difference. I am dumbfounded with how much clearer everything sounds now.

What I put into practice is the Dead-End/Live-End principle of monitoring. In general, it is best to have a dead front end (behind the studio monitors) and a somewhat live back end (where, say, the band sits when you're mixing their record). This way, the sounds that are coming towards you from the speakers is (almost) only the sound that's coming out of the speakers--not reflections from the rear wall, not flutter echo, but just the sounds with which you are working.

Now, I don't have the really expensive "diffusers" that most studios have behind the mix position. These serve to randomly reflect the sound. I used to wonder why these things cost so much, but once you figure out what their for, they almost seem under priced.

Another related issue to all of this has to do with monitor size. For about 9 years, I have been using 8" Roland digital monitors. I bought them to work in conjunction with my VS-1680. They worked well up until last week. The left one burned out last Monday. The right one burned out on Tuesday.

Even with my room analyzer, the bass from my mixes always seemed under-represented. It made no sense to me because I had some sub-traps in the speakers themselves and they should have been giving me an accurate picture. What I discovered was that 8" speakers are too big for a 10 x 10 room. So, I "downgraded" to a 5" speaker. I also put some Mo-Pads under the speaker to decouple them from the speaker stands. Now, the low end is very accurate in my room.

The other thing that bothered me about my old hi-tech, digital monitors was that they didn't give me a "flat" picture of what I was mixing. The sound was somewhat sweetened. This is counter-intuitive to what the purpose of monitoring is. Monitors should be flat so that you can accurately hear everything in a mix. You should let the listener decide where she wants to set her EQ levels. Mixing on flat monitors is a challenge, but if you can get it sounding good there, you can bet that it will sound good anywhere.

So, the point of this rant is this: if you have a project studio, it's a good idea to invest in acoustic treatments. You'll be surprised when you can actually hear what you are mixing. And, with monitoring, bigger isn't always better. The size of your speaker should correlate to the size of your room.