R/E/P > Acoustics in Motion

My Most Important Piece of Equipment

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Phil Debol:
Hi all,

Over the past few years, I have beat myself up, trying to improve the acoustics in my control room. In particular, control room acoustics while mixing with nearfields. Day after day, I would mix, make a CD, run to the car and listen. Only to find that I just spent the last few hours struggling to put a mix together and its just mediocre at best. And of course, the bottom end is always hit or miss and a guessing game. In an attempt to tighten up my bottom end, the last few months I have moved some bass trapping around. I would make an adjustment, and the results would be obvious and for the better, but still not acceptable to me. I would make another adjustment and again hear a bit more improvement. Then I thought the light bulb came on and I made more than a bit of a change. That was the wrong way to go. So, I went back one step and tweaked more on that.

Currently, I'm happier and closer to the true bottom end that I've ever been and I am spending less time getting to the finish line because I'm not fighting the clarity of the bottom end as much as I had been. With that said, I have come to the opinion that my most important piece of equipment is the control room I'm working in. If it does not translate, then I am not able to do my job to the best of my ability. No matter the quality of the sound of the instrument, microphone, or preamp. I cannot make those pieces of equipment sound the best they can unless I can accurately hear what is coming through the speakers. Too many times I have ruined a kick drum with eq because I could not hear the bottom end that was there but was not able to hear it.

My compliments to the acoustician that can build a control room that translates and in which an engineer can mix efficiently on nearfields with confidence.

PD

davethesoundguy:
I agree that a well-designed control room is hugely important to the mix, but for me anyway, I can't mix on nearfields. Essentially, as you implied, nearfields just dont reproduce anything of use in the lower octaves; and music these days is CRAWLING with LF.  I am a huge fan of quality nearfields to check midrange and high stuff, but for the overall building of a mix, I have to work on something that is smooth and accurate down into the ultra lows. 

I know a lot of guys dislike them, but I pretty much always have subs in my primary mix setup, and my general rule of thumb is they have to run at least a half octave lower than what I want to be hearing. If I can't hear it, I can't mix it, you know?

That being said, listening to subs in a badly designed/badly controlled room is an exercise in futility.   It all has to work as a system.

Dinogi:
... and possibly the most expensive.
and as you have already undoubtedly discovered, often times solving one problem can expose or create a different one.
I'm sure the pros here have many horror stories about builds that got exponentially more expensive very quickly during construction. 
olduncledinogiammattei
.....I'd trade everything I use now for a good sounding room and a bucket of 57's.

1aahnoor:
. No matter the quality of the sound of the instrument, microphone, or preamp. I cannot make those pieces of equipment sound the best they can unless I can accurately hear what is coming through the speakers.

Jim Williams:
I once did a rough mix by meters, no sound. It wasn't perfect, but a lot better than I thought it would be.

I aways believed if one had enough time you could teach a chimpanzee to mix. A few concerts I've been to sounded like a chimp was mixing, an untrained chimp.

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