Did you know that your room has a huge impact on how your final tracks sound? Unfortunately it’s true. Your room (i.e. where you mix) is constantly fighting you as you mix, changing the sound of your studio monitors, and giving you false information about what you think you’re hearing. It’s actually pretty depressing if you think about it.
Via Steve Jay Flickr
Sound Spills All Over The Place
To accurately diangose the problem we have to be aware of the simple fact that sound doesn’t just come out of your speakers in a nice straight line, direct to our ears. I wish! Rather it spills out of the cone all over your room. It spreads like light from a lamp, in all directions. Sure it shoots direct to your ears, but it also shoots direct to your side walls, ceiling, floor, and even back wall. What a mess!
So what’s really going on is you are not ONLY hearing the true sound of your speakers (aka, your mix) but in addition you’re hearing the reflections of your mix bouncing around your room and ending back up in your ears. These signals blend together and are delivered to your brain as what you “hear” in your mix. So the problem, people, is you never are truly hearing your mix in it’s purest sense. Your room plays a part in your sound.
Headphones Anyone?
So maybe you’re quite aware of the problem. You might even have discovered some solutions. Let’s address them now. The simplest solution that springs to my mind is to simply remove the room from the equation and mix with headphones. Bam! Take that stupid room reflections!
But let me say something about headphones. Although it is perfectly possible to mix on headphones alone, it’s not ideal longterm. Mixes that sound good on headphones might not sound good on speakers. But mixes that sound good on speakers, almost always sound good on headphones as well. It’s an interesting phenomenon that I discussed with Joe Gilder on a past episode the Simply Recording Podcast. Check that out for more of my thoughts on headphone mixing.
How About Acoustic Treatment?
Other than removing the room from the equation by mixing in headphones, your only other option is to change the sound of your room and reduce the amount of reflections. That way we will hear primarily what our speakers are telling us, not what our walls are telling us. And we do this how? With acoustic treatment.
To put it simply, acoustic treatment (in the form of diffusion or absorption) is a great tool in the home or project studio because it is an affordable and easy way to stop the sound spilling madness and “tighten up” your sound. But what treatment do you need? Where do you put it? How does it really work? More on that to come. Just know for now that acoustic treatment can be your friend in the quest for better mixes.
Knowing The Truth
What I want you know today is the truth. The truth about your room. And the truth is this: your room is part of your sound whether you like it or not. Where you mix matters. What room you’re in changes what you’ll hear. Where in that room you sit affects things as well. The stuff inside your room plays a huge role also. Over the next two weeks I plan on addressing all of these issues and hope to leave you with some solid tips and tricks to get the most out of your room!
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My name is Graham Cochrane and I'm the founder of The Recording Revolution, one of the world's most loved audio recording and mixing blogs with over 200,000 readers each month. 
Ok, so lets say you go all out and in some magical way you get the perfect room!
its awsome and you are now mixing with TRUTH IN YOUR EARS – amazing!
it all goes out the window once the track is out of your perfect room and played back in different places, even different headphones…
once more its very much affected by the wonders of the univers. or physics – whatever you prefer 🙂
The thing is, the “Perfect Room” isn’t to make the mix sound good. It is to help you hear the problems. That way you can fix them. Graham is right on. If you can’t hear the ugly bump at 400hz you wont fix it until you take it to you car (or wherever) and realize that mix that sounded awesome in you studio really sounds like garbage. It’s quicker, easier and a lot less depressing to hear it for real in your studio.
well, if you hear the problemes (which are obviousley affected by the space you are listening in) you make the mix sound better and the entire point is to make the MIXture of sounds, sound good or even great if you can 🙂 thats the way i see it at least.
but the point i was trying to make is that even if you hear the problemes as you said and fix them, the mix sounds good as a result but then when its “out there” in the real and acousticly untreated world, it will sound as good or as bad as the space where it is listened to.
I see what you are saying but it’s not that simple. As an analogy let’s say I am trying to color correct a photo but am wearing a pair of those blue blocker sunglasses that turn things all yellow looking. I am going to add a lot of blue to make it look good. If I take that photo into other places with different light it won’t change the fact that it has waaaay to much blue tint to it. Your room without treatment is the sunglasses. In my room I had a huge dip around 350Hz. Every mix I would take anywhere for the first (or fourth) listen would be really muddy. Rood treatment is like taking the colored glasses off.
Dan
i dont think you realy got what i was saying.
im all for treating your studio (or wearing the right kind of glasses), no doubt.
the probleme is not the mixers “glasses” or enviroment, its the listners’.
sadly, in 99.99% of the cases, your mix will never sound the same as it did in your studio when you felt its done and youre happy with it, because your listeners have different spaces, headphones, speakers, they add EQ to their liking (like that awful “LOUD” button on car stereo systems) and there you go – its not REALY you original mix as intended. unless you bring everyone to your place or get your place mobilized to every listener for “maximum listening experience” 🙂
so all the hard work you do is basically for other professional to appreciate or audiophiles. these are the only people that bother with good equipment and listening ereas.
there is nothing even close to a perfect room. when people treat rooms they are getting rid of 30db peaks and valleys. making them 15db. big improvement but not close to perfect.
and like you say most listeners will hear it distorted with bad consumer products in bad rooms. but the point of mixing and treating rooms is to get the mix to translate as well as possible to these non-ideal spaces.
imagine you have 2 sine waves that you are mixing together. one at 500hz one at 700hz. u think this sounds great. for mix A you use a great room and set the levels for each sine wave. for mix B you use a terrible room and sit in a 500hz null. you set the levels again for mix B. this time you bring up the fader on the 500hz sine wave 30db because you sat in the null.
lets say for mix A the sine waves had a relationship of 1:1 in level. but in mix B you compensated for that null and now the relationship is 1:4. (excuse the sloppy math). which mix will translate better across all playback environments? so that’s the point of treating a room and how it improves things even outside the studio. it’s not so much about making it sound good in the studio…it’s about making it translate well to real world places.
I’d like to hear about D.I.Y acoustic treatment Graham! I think there’re tons of great products out there to achieve a better sounding room, but I find them too expensive for me. But I know we can make great improvements in our rooms with some cheap materials. Last year I built some acoustic panels for my back wall, and I’m very happy with them. I’d like to build some more acoustic treatment without spending a lot of money.
So how about, in a strictly hypothetical sense, mixing in the open? Say you could find a nice open garden, surely that could solve the problem.
That might endanger your gear a little (rain and other things). Also, you would want the outside area would to be pretty quiet, which isn’t too common, at least where I live.
I always wanted to record vocals outside for the same reason. Any wind, bird chirping or anything else would ruin that though, unless it was a cool effect you were going for! There’s a place for everything right?!
great post graham
Looking forward for more posts regarding room acoustics
Aby diy tips would be cool
Great topic, Graham!
I occasionally do a recording session in my church sanctuary. 75 feet length and width, and a 35 foot high sloping ceiling. When I set up near the middle of that room, with the reflective surfaces so far away- it’s amazing how good my monitors sound! And mix decisions are so easy!
Acoustic treatment can do so much to improve both the sound that’s recorded, and the quality of the mix.
Hi Graham,
You are correct about reflections. Finding that balance (each user appears to have a different balance) between direct and reflected energy is our quest. In monitoring, we want more direct less room/reflections. We want to hear everything in the mix.
Reflections are our nemesis when it comes to middle and high frequency issues. What confuses me is that in small control rooms, or any small room for that matter, people still think foam will absorb low frequency energy at a rate and level that will have an acoustical impact. It will not and low frequency attack and decay must be managed within our monitoring rooms. Without it, we are looking at our mix through low frequency “syrup”.
Keep up the good work, Graham. If you need any assistance on your quest through room acoustics, please feel free to contact me.
Thanks Mike.
acoustic treatments just aren’t sexy. when you see shots of studios it’s always the board, or a rack full of analog gear, maybe the room if it’s beautiful and exotic.
i tell people to expect to pay 4 times your monitor price in room treatments. i know i didn’t want to hear that. 2k on foam and fiberglass? fugetit.
i think quality headphones are a good option for people that can’t afford a decent set of portless full spectrum monitors. the treatment and monitors can easily reach 4k. the headphones are mostly under $500.
if i were to put down a hierarchy for getting a good sound it would go like this: source, room, mic placement, mic type…then blah blah blah converters and preamp and magic cables.
one thing i think that is widely misunderstood about room treatment…you hear about bass being the big issue. first reflections can be really bad too as you mention. but bass costs much more to treat. it’s really the hardest thing to solve. if you have room modes at 60hz foam will not touch it unless it’s feet thick. btw, you can easily test any improvement you make (or think you make) to your room with acoustic analysis software.
good video. very important for mixers to understand this one.
There are also electronic and software solutions; ARC etc. I just got this and will let you know what I think when its installed. In theory its wonderful but I’ll reserve judgment until I have used it and tested my mixes outside the studio.
i think a lot of nice studios use some corrective eq but it’s like the last 5%. in other words… you get everything else right first and then use a little eq at the end.
there are some problems with using software/eq to solve major issues. acoustic treatments make the whole room sound better. eq not so much. imagine you have a null at 200hz midroom and a peak 6 feet from the wall. how will eq deal with those? it can’t. so the eq will work in some places and not others. most likely your listening position will be where you treat with eq but your head better stay right there. bolt it down dude!
other issue: you are using eq to correct things in the time domain not frequency. not sure i said that right. here goes an explanation. room problems like modes are really “ringing” or resonance issues. it’s like trying to take reverb off with eq. you can’t do it. you can eq the reverb but the real solution is to remove it AKA treat the room acoustically.
so you may be able to balance out the frequency spectrum but you can’t remove ringing (modes), first reflections, comb filtering, with eq.
is that clear like a mud puddle? if so sorry. 😀
+1 Chris
The Focusrite VRM has saved my bacon a couple of times, but even that isn’t a substitute for a well-planned, practical room treatment. I’ve used the ARC plugin David mentioned, and (to my ears) it cut out as much good as it did bad. The mixes sounded flat while I worked on them, and that just sapped the inspiration and creativity out of my process. That, of course, is personal opinion and experience.
Thanks for the input on ARC Chris. I got this sometime ago and have never installed it because of reservations and appreciate your comments. I will try it out and see. Right now I am in the process of removing more plugins to a “do not use ” folder. So that I can return to a much more focused approach to my music.
When I listen tony old stuff recorded on tape, some of which was on 4 track cassette tape, before all my computer studio days. I was amazed that the stuff sounded so good now and it was because I got the sound right before recording it and everyone was very well rehearsed before we would lay tracks down.
I found Grahams Rethink Mixing to be a great help in getting back to this way of doing things.
Sorry Mark I mean You 🙂
Here is one of the easiest DIY panel to build…
http://www.joedocmusic.com/?p=194
They work great & cost very little. There is a TON of sites for this stuff, Google is your friend!
I hung large moving blankets on my walls in the new place, spaced about 2″ out, and tho it DID NOT help the low end, the reflections were cut drastically & the stereo imaging improved immensely.
Check this out…..
http://www.palmcitystudios.com/timobrien/music/soundbooth/simplesoundbooth.html
This simple build, which cost $30 a few years back, improved the home recordings of a friend like you would not believe!
Room Treatment is NOT the end all, but it DOES help!
An interesting “thing” I recently discovered was creating mixes that sound good on mobile devices (ie iPhones, etc.). Perhaps it will change over time, but over 30% of a recent upload to YouTube were listened to on a mobile device. I had mixed & mixed & mixed to make it sound good through many different reference points (stereos, headphones, etc.) but it hadn’t dawned on me to listen to it through the speakers on my iPhone – ugh. In a panic, I pulled up the mix & fortunately, it didn’t sound that bad. I guess I got lucky.
Home Recording Weekly has started development for DIY plans, for your exact rooms, and will be featured on the website soon. I do not wish to take any traffic from Graham tho, so lets see what he has to say first. As usual Graham, you beat me on another issue. Great podcast episode too!
Looking forward to the posts!
There are two major phases, in my opinion, to producing a good mix.
The first, as Graham and others often point out, is isolating and removing problems. I personally can’t often afford to work in a “great” or even “good” room, so I employ everything I have at my disposal. Headphones, barriers, etc.
The second, more obvious phase, is fine-tuning and balancing the mix. I like to do this in as good of a room as possible, with the highest quality monitors available, so I can realize the true potential of the mix. With that as my baseline, I begin listening to that mix in every way I can: mono through a small speaker, from another room, quiet, loud, mp3, hi-fi, phone, car… I make notes of what translates well, and what doesn’t quite cut it. That allows me to tweak the mix with greater precision and impact the “true potential” the least.
If I have to sacrifice my width for a minor phase problem that doesn’t undermine the mix, I’m going to stick with the width. On the other hand, if I need to lose a little bottom end to keep from sounding washed out or muddy on a phone speaker – or more likely, from sounding terrible on those god-forsaken “bass-enhanced” ear buds – I’ll cut the bottom a bit and re-balance where necessary.
If I had the time or thought people really cared enough to appreciate it, I’d personally make a hi-fi (96/24) mix, cd (44.1/16) and mp3 mix for everything.
* Solutions:
• Low cost option:
– IK Multimedia’s ARC – (works with any stereo pair of studio monitors, minus surround)
• High cost option:
– JBL LSR4326P with DSP Room Mode Calibration – (supports stereo & surround sound mixing)
These options work great even if you’re mixing in a room with zero acoustic treatment. If you happen to have the luxury of mixing in a room with acoustic treatment (absorption and diffusion for the walls + bass traps for the corners) then ARC or the JBL LSR4326P setup will compliment the translation of your mixes drastically.
Big up yourself.
Nothing takes the place of acoustic treatment. Digitally adjusting sound waves is a sudo adjustment. It offsets the overall eq. which causes other issues, depending on the room it is attempting to compensate for. If your room is really bad forget it. If you have not mixed in the correct acoustic environment, and use just a digital compensation, it will be hard for you to grasp the correct acoustical process.The process is to mix in the best acoustical environment as possible, to eliminate frequency imperfections via eq (When you have included an over all eq compensator, you will fight with sound dynamics whether you realize it or not. You will not know what it is really suppose to sound like). Once you have mixed in the acoustically sound environment, and have corrected the problem frequencies. This mix is will translated better on outside of the studio, listening environments if you are also mixing correctly. This is just the way it works.
+1. it’s kinda like trying to remove reverb with an eq. very limited success with that. 😀
Hi Graham
Thanks for sharing your passion and experiences…
Could you also cover portable sound barriers, such Auralex Mudguard, Soundkitz AE-F, as I need to record on site, in offices etc
Jane
I’ve reviewed the Editors Keys Portable Vocal booth here: http://therecordingrevolution.com/2010/03/12/editors-keys-portable-vocal-booth-review/
What about listen our mixes in different places, devices, speakers, etc?
Definitely a must part of mixing. I’ve mentioned that here before: http://therecordingrevolution.com/2012/05/28/3-reality-checks-for-mixing/
@graham How big is too big of a room to mix in? i have my studio set up in my garage. the area around my desk and monitors is partially treated but behind me is approximately 400 sq ft of open space. i as considering kind of decreasing the area by hanging think blankets and creating kind of a smaller deader space as to not have the sound just exploding all over the room. any thoughts would be appreciated. i just moved into this house and this is the space I’m provided. my old mixing room was much much smaller and far easier to treat.
I don’t think there is “too big” of a space. Just be mindful of potential reflections near your mixing space.
@Gram 1st great post.i follow ur posts on a basis been reading a lot of posts seems people are debating bout this & that which is normal but we all know the truth mixing without room treatment is like painting with no eyes u wont see the picture.Ive also noticed your Rode is not placed in a booth of some sort but ur room is nicely treated though.does that work best 4 u not having a booth?i.e do u like the ambience?Reason im asking is that im looking to spot treat my room wth traps,absorption,diffusion etc but if its dead silent is the booth necessary?I also have a Rode Nt1a mounted around vicoustic flexi screen.Any comments from anybody else will be helpful, but i really want dead tight pro vocals i dont mind spending on more acoustic to build the booth.,my signal chain is crayyyze not really the aspect of my post Cheers guys
Treatment on the walls, or at least close to the microphone will help you get that “dead” sound. Also, recording vocals in a closet full of clothes does wonders.