We recently asked a question of our community on Facebook, we asked what frustrates us most about studio monitoring. The results overwhelmingly spoke about the effect of the room in which the monitors are used and their effect on the results.  Coming quite a distant second after acoustics was the cost of good quality monitors.

First to acoustics. As producers, as opposed to consumers of audio, we need an awareness of the havoc wreaked on the carefully designed performance of a quality studio monitor once you take it out from an anechoic chamber and put it in an actual room, with walls and gear and people. But listening is an active process and the fact that we can sit at the back of a concert hall and mentally unpick all of those reflections and perceive the dry sound of that instrument on stage is testament to the fact that while a microphone measures, an ear listens.

So what can we do to improve our monitoring?

Can’t We Just Avoid The Effect of Rooms?

Does it matter?

We hear many people say things along the lines of “I know my room and I know my monitors”. Can we just cut the room out of the equation by using headphones exclusively? What about using speaker calibration to correct for the effect of the room? Can you bypass all of this agonising over the neutrality of your monitoring by just mixing your track and then making use of a mastering engineer? After all, great monitoring is expensive. Why buy when you can hire someone instead?

A monitoring system is the combination of the monitors and the room they are in. Great monitors aren’t cheap but a great listening room can cost much more than your monitors and the process of measuring and acoustically treating a room is much more complicated than just buying some nice speakers. It’s no surprise that acoustics came out as the most common frustration we have about monitoring.

Do Acoustics Matter Anyway?

Looking at the need for acoustic treatment in the first place. How much does it really matter? Opinion is divided. In this opinion piece from last year, Russ seeks to simplify the situation. Can you get your work done and is the work good? If so, then your time might be better spent getting on with mixing rather than focusing too much on chasing improvements, which might be marginal. A good mix that has been completed is always better than a perfect mix that hasn’t…

Of course, that is only one side of the story, none other than Steve Lipson, an engineer of great repute countered Russ’ argument with the following piece. Make up your own mind…

Would Mixing In Near Anechoic Rooms Help?

Rooms are something of a necessary evil when it comes to monitoring. Walls reflect sound in much the same way that mirrors reflect light. Because of this when you are sitting in front of your monitors you are hearing the sound not just from the monitors but also the sound of those monitors after it has bounced off every surface in the room, often more than once.

Damping the room with absorbent material sounds like a good idea. This idea was tried in the control rooms of decades ago but apart from the fact that near anechoic spaces are very unpleasant to spend time in, the room still has its dimensions of length, breadth and height and domestic sized rooms don’t accommodate bass frequencies comfortably. Room modes and the destructive interference caused by them is very difficult to deal with in smaller rooms.

To understand how the standing waves which cause room modes behave watch the video below and for a more general discussion on studio acoustics from someone who really knows their stuff listen to our interview with acoustics guru Andy Munro.

One thing which I suspect most of us believe, even if we’ve never tested it, is that that the room a pair of monitors is in affects the sound at least as much as what the monitors are (within reason). In an interesting article from a few years ago Sonarworks, the makers of the popular speaker calibration software used the measurement tools in Sonarworks to show that, in their test, the room affects the sound more than the monitors do! 

What About Mixing On Headphones?

Looking at the damage rooms do to the sound, makes the idea of mixing on headphones sounds very attractive. By piping the sound directly into the ears, all of those messy reflections and room modes can be avoided completely.

It sounds like a great idea but very few people mix exclusively on headphones. Reasons given often involve the way panning is presented, The next article below, looks at the difference between listening on headphones and speakers, the role of crosstalk between the channels and the effects of inter-aural delay and head masking all play a part but while its undoubtedly true that headphones sound very different from speakers, why are speakers still considered the standard way of consuming music?

After all, with the growth in the use of mobile devices and streaming services, what proportion of music is listened to on headphones in 2021? If the music is being consumed on headphones, shouldn’t it be mixed on headphones too?

So there has been an increase in the use of headphones. The discussion so far has been aimed at music so far but while the majority of film and TV is still consumed via speakers, the proportion of video content consumed over headphones has grown from almost nothing a few years ago to what we’d assume to be a significant proportion today because of the use of mobile devices. With binaural mixes of Dolby Atmos content now possible, headphones are encroaching on speakers as the principal way audio content is consumed.

Improve The Studio Acoustics

In spite of this, given the choice, everyone still wants monitoring based around loudspeakers and to get the most out of them the room needs to be as good as you can make it. Just how good you can make it depends on your space, your budget and your determination but there are principles that can be followed which don’t require a great outlay of resources.

Whether you’ve converted the second bedroom into your new award-winning mix facility, hijacked the top end of the dining table, or evicted the family mower from the garden shed, in this article Mike Rigby is going to explore some tips, tricks, issues, and best practice when setting up your home working environment.

Here are some suggestions to get you started, detailed explanations of how Mike Thornton and Dan Cooper approached the acoustics in their studios and some suggestions for some homemade and off the shelf products which can help tame a home studio space.

In this article, Dan covers the methods of acoustic treatment he has used and shares his experiences and views on whether or not they made any improvement to the acoustics of the rooms he has worked in.

Following on from Dan's article,  Mike shares his experiences and the techniques he has used for his current studio.

At that time, his time was cheaper than employing a specialist, so he decided to go down the DIY route, but he wanted to do it as well as he could. You can't just choose a range of products and throw it into your room and hope for the best. It’s a bit like a good cake, you need all the ingredients in the right proportions, put together in the correct way and baked to perfection. Get any bit wrong and the cake will be a flop, sometimes literally.

Part 1 - Floor And Ceiling Solutions

Part 2 - Acoustic Treatment - What To Use And How Much

Part 3 - Ventilation And Cooling

In this article, we check out 7 brands that provide low cost off the shelf acoustic treatment solutions designed to help improve the acoustics of your studio.

But what if you are renting or in temporary accommodation and cannot fix things to the walls or the ceiling, what are your options? The ASC AttackWall has been designed to easily convert any room into a professional sounding studio.

In this article, find out how the ASC AttackWall could help you improve the acoustics of your temporary home studio without any building work or DIY and since it's freestanding, you won't need to screw, nail or glue anything to your walls, making it great for renters or temporary spaces.

If you can attach acoustic treatment to the walls and ceiling then there are plenty of DIY solutions out there to help you improve the acoustics in your studio and help your studio monitoring to perform better and more consistently. Here are just two DIY solutions to wet your appetite…

In this article, we feature a video by DIY Perks, which demonstrates how to build home studio acoustic treatment panels on a budget. You won't believe what materials were used to make these super budget home studio acoustic absorption panels.

In this article, we share a video produced by Ray Ortega who shows how to build acoustic panels at home. In this video, he walks you through the entire process including measurements, where to install wood braces and, most importantly, how to install the absorption material and fabric covering.

Passive Acoustics

Conventional approaches to sorting out studio acoustics involve “passive” measures. That means putting material into a space, which absorbs and diffuses the sound in a helpful way to control the effect of the room has on the sound. Invariably there is more absorption involved than diffusion but by installing suitable material in the right quantities and in the right places it is possible to fix many of the issues. You might consider avoiding these issues by using ‘room correction’ either in hardware or software.

Software products such as Sonarworks SoundID or IK Multimedia ARC, or hardware products like Genelec’s GLM and SAM monitors or the Trinnov systems can achieve amazing results, making a good room great, but physics is physics and while they can help, none of these products can make a bad room good. These solutions should be seen as a way to further improve something which is already good.

Find out more about Speaker Calibration Software and the use of DSP in Monitors for Speaker calibration and for crossover implementation.

EQ Can Help With Room Issues But It Can’t Fix Them Completely

The reason for this is simple. Rooms colour sound because of reflections. These reflections cause time-based artefacts: Some frequencies decay more slowly than others, causing a ‘hang’ at certain pitches. These artefacts cause some frequencies to build up and be too loud and others to disappear. Speaker calibration changes the gain of different frequencies but can’t fix these time-domain effects. They can help alleviate but if you have a long overhang at 160Hz, turning 160Hz down will help but can’t fix it in the same way as absorbing that energy in a bass trap would.

Bass Trapping is difficult in domestic sized spaces. To be effective to very low frequencies, bass traps have to be very large, too large for small studios. To a lesser degree, this is also true of diffusion. Google Studio C at Blackbird Studios in Nashville and you’ll see how imposing diffusion can be when it’s done properly!

There have been some interesting developments in using smart materials to cut down the size of absorbers and diffusors. We previously reported on ultra-thin absorbers and diffusors While both of the materials in these two articles are at the research stage they show that while the laws of physics can’t be broken, they can at least be bent a little.

A more practical way to get compact bass trapping and to use technology to control the reverb time of a space, though in this case to lengthen it rather than shorten it, is to use “active acoustics”. While something of a side note in this discussion do check out the article on Active Acoustics, an interesting area.

Active Acoustics

Cost Of Good Quality Monitors

The second point raised was the cost of monitors. So how much do you have to spend on a pair of monitors? I’ve been asked this question many times and I’ve always said the same thing. Spend as little as you can of your first pair and when you can afford some ‘proper’ monitors then spend as much as you can afford and get some monitors you’ll keep forever.

The thing which has changed about this advice is what you can expect to get for this first pair of monitors. For what used to be a better-than-nothing option, for the same money today you can get a viable pair of monitors, which you might well choose to hang on to when you get that pair of ‘forever’ monitors. The bottom end has improved a lot in the last few years.

For low-cost monitors here are some suggestions. These are monitors we’ve actually tested. There is other good stuff out there some of which we’ve omitted because we haven’t tried them ourselves.

Low Cost Monitors

A cheap as possible first pair of monitors are likely to be 2 way with a 5” to 7” bass/mid driver. An upgrade might well be a similar 2-way design but I’d definitely recommend at least considering a 3-way monitor.

Should You Go 3 Way?

In terms of how much you should spend, I originally said as much as you can afford but I’d probably refine that to as much as you can justify. Here are some recommendations at different price points. You get what you pay for but you can get an embarrassingly good monitor for less than you used to be able to so while a top-flight ATC is a beautiful thing, there are very worthy contenders at all price points.

How Much Should You Spend?

Recommendations

Very High End

High End

Small Space

Compact 3 Way

On A Budget

Conclusion

We’ve maintained for a long time here at Production Expert that the really important parts of your signal chain are the transducers - the things which turn sound into electricity and electricity back into sound. Microphones are discussed endlessly by audio types.

With good reason, they are fascinating things, each with their own character. The other thing, which I’d add about microphones is that rooms can make microphones more fun. The effect of a room on a studio monitor is pretty much always negative. Maybe we’ll just have to wait until we have direct injection into our auditory nerves and cut out all this messy business with squeezing and stretching air!

What do you think?