Have you been in recording studios lately? They are all over the map acoustically - from totally dead (the "Non Room"), through variations of live and dead ends, a few outliers that are totally diffusive, and many that are variations on "normal" - as in acoustically similar to a typical domestic room. Tracking and mixing rooms can be quite different from mastering rooms, which should in a rational world be similar to domestic spaces, if that is the intended customer.
So, from the get-go, in spite of all possible variables, there is more "standardization" in domestic rooms and in professionally designed listening rooms than in professional control and mastering rooms. This is illustrated in Figure 10.1 in the 3rd edition of my book.
Fortunately - and this is truly fortunate - in spite of differences in rooms, it is the loudspeakers that dominate perceived sound quality. Most of my book explains that, and the fact that human listeners are perceptually able to separate the sound of the source from that added by the room. This is true in live unamplified music and in sound reproduction. So, the fundamental requirement for controlling the "circle of confusion" is to ensure that all loudspeakers from recording to playback radiate similar sounds. As increasing numbers of loudspeakers adhere to the rational design goals that science has provided, things are definitely improving.
BTW I know of no listening tests by me or by Sean Olive (together or separately) that were not conducted in rooms designed to resemble typical domestic rooms. To do otherwise serves no purpose. In fact an elaborate test was conducted that showed that listeners rated loudspeakers similarly in four very different real rooms - Section 7.6.2 in the 3rd edition. This is good news. Buy truly good loudspeakers, relax and enjoy them.
This is absolutely the case, there is no standardization at all in studio design.
I can share some experience from the production side that folks here might find interesting.
I worked for a while in a studio designed by a top designer. We struggled for years because both the recording space and control room were unbelievably damped. It sounded nothing like any room I'd ever been in. It was designed to meet specific criteria for frequency response and reverberation times. But the space was small. The designer managed to meet the "paper specs" at the cost of a sub-optimal working space. It wasn't terrible, but there were some challenges. Eventually someone got frustrated and just took out some of the treatment down. It was a wonderful improvement.
There are aspects of recording/mixing that I find easier to do in a "normal" room, as opposed to a typical studio environment.
For example, I find getting the basic level balances between elements of the mix easier to do in a regular room. And this is the most important part of the mix! One would think balancing the relative levels, the voice, the drums, the instruments, would be easier on a nice studio monitor in a controlled space, but it's not that simple.
There is something that Floyd said about engineers using
bad speakers while working that I would like to clarify.
Many engineers, whether recording, mixing, or mastering
do use bad speakers in the process. But the use is not based on the theory that
if it sounds good on these speakers it wIll sound good anywhere. That is simply not the case. Relying on a bad speaker when producing music will basically give you the
inverse pattern of its deficiencies in your mix.
Checking the mix on the bad speaker gives the engineer
information about the mix that is not always apparent on the main studio monitors. By checking on different speakers, the engineer can get a sense of how well the mix will
translate to other systems in the "real world."
One of the shocking things when you start out trying to make recordings is that just making your mix sound good on your studio monitors does not suffice to make a mix that
translates well across other playback systems. This is a complex subject. It's taken me years to get a handle on this, and it's still a challenge. (I've been working in pro audio 30 years of so. I'm a slow learner
I have a "cognitive framework" that I have come up with to help with all aspects of music production, and it addresses the issues with working on bad speakers, as well as the issues of working in imperfect studios. I've dubbed it:
The Principle Of Listening
In a nutshell, it's a suggestion that all changes that are made to a recording as it moves through the production process should be made based on
how the change affects the sound of the recording. That means the change is
made by ear. This sounds ridiculous at first, because it seems obvious. What else could you do?
It turns out that anyone making a recording can be easily led astray and make decisions about the signal on criteria that
are not based on how the change effects the
sound of the mix.
For example, music is produced mostly on the computer these days, and there is a lot of onscreen visual stimulation. A listeners attention is inevitable drawn to focus on the screen, which has a profound effect on auditory perception (and not a good one.) Even if you are working and
trying to ignore the visual "noise" in the workspace.
Another common side-track is to make decisions about which piece of equipment or software to use based on its reputation:
Oh, so and so famous mixer uses this DSP compressor plugin on every mix! So I'll use that on all my mixes too!...Or...
this mic is advertised as being great for vocals, so that's the ticket to making our smash hit record!
Another common example is the use of spectrum analyzer to assess your mix. A tool like this can tell you where you might have problems in the mix, but at best these serve
as clues. You cannot fix the issue shown on the frequency analyzer by just making changes with global EQ until the shape of the frequency response
looks like what you are going for. Such an approach will mess up the artfully created
musicality of the mix.
So the frequency analyzer can give you information about your mix. But how does the engineer/mixer
use this information?
This same issue presents itself when you check your mixes on other speakers. For example, a practice with a
very long pedigree is
checking the mix on a car audio system. Say you listen in the car, and the mix sounds totally off! You can't hear certain instruments, it has boomy low midrange, uneven dynamics! Very disappointing to everyone working on it.
How do you fix these newly perceived issues? Suppose you could bring your mix system
right out to the car, plug it in to the audio system and fix the problems right there. (And you can do this now-a-days because it's trivial to mix on a laptop.)
But if you sit in the car, making adjustments to your mix until it sounds great, you will have made no progress, and probably made your mix much worse! Such an approach to mixing will result in a mix that will probably not translate to other systems at all.
To use the
Principle of Listening you have to be able to perceive the issue you noticed
on another system on your
main studio monitors. And if the monitors and room are at least decent, you usually can. You can hear those very same issue on the studio monitors, but it will take concentration and critical listening skills.
This paradoxical issue is exacerbated in part because modern studio monitors have great dynamic range, and are utilized in the overly deadened spaces Floyd mentioned.
In a dead room, this "perceptual dynamic" range is enhanced far beyond a regular listening environment. Such a monitoring environment can be so clear, that it becomes very hard to judge relative volume of signals. You can mix a
loud instrument with a
soft one, and both will be perfectly
perceptible in the studio. But in an average playback environment, the loud signal can "mask" the quite one dramatically, so the balance of the instruments is way off.
A regular room is more reflective and the sound is more diffuse. And the playback system is usually not so great. In such a space, the sound interacts with the speaker, reflects off objects, and energizes the physical space. This general "mixing up" of the sound makes the difference in the average sound energy level of different sounds in the mix much more apparent.
So problem for the engineer is that they need to
fix a problem in their mix
that is not a problem on their main monitors!
The first part of using the
Principle of Listening is to tune into perceiving the problem you heard in the car, for example, on your main monitors. You do this with
critical listening. Once you can clearly perceive the issue in your monitors, you can make adjustments that correct the problem by listening, making sure the mix still
sounds good while making the adjustment. Not just "blindly" changing something in hopes it fixes it.
Bass response is one of the biggest problems for monitoring environments, and the modern, dead-ish control rooms can absorb
a lot of bass frequencies. This can result in mixes that are way too heavy in the low frequencies, which can be very disheartening. This is done to give the room a more even frequency response, but it comes with all sorts of costs.
Another big issue is that overly treated rooms, coupled with good monitors, can handle much bigger dynamic ranges than everyday systems. Our ear is not that sensitive to changes in levels. Most of the cues in a mix that communicate "loudness" are delivered by timbre, not level.
Another way we perceive dynamic sound level changes is by how the sound energy is transferred to the objects in the room, including the speaker itself, the walls, the floor, things that rattle. These level changes can be
almost invisible in some control rooms. The speakers are very isolated from the structure of the room, the reverberation times are reduced (with attempts to maintain neutral frequency response), the amps for the speakers are very powerful and won't distort.
So some person out there is listening to your mix, sounds pretty good! But it has some very large low frequency dynamic hits, that on your studio monitors played just fine. The listener decides crank up the volume, and all of a sudden the speaker is distorting, the media cabinet is resonating, things are falling off the walls. Not so fun for the listener!
If you
know you have an issue with some frequencies or dynamics, with critical listening, and some
helper tools, you
can address the problem. Making the changes by ear allows the engineer to gauge the
type and amount of adjustments to while making sure those changes at the least don't
detract from the musicality of the mix. Ideally the fixing "problems" in a mix ultimately results in better mix all around, no matter what system its played on.
Despite these observations, the thought of treating production environments
more like regular listening environments gives me pause. As I've described, some issues in a mix
can be much easier to perceive in a "real world" setting.
But...
Studio monitors enable a level of clarity that is essential in making the nuanced adjustments that a good mix needs.
The biggest problem is perhaps the challenge of accurately assessing the
amount and color of the ambience in the recording, because the ambience of the working space will blend with the ambience in the recording, preventing you from hearing what you really have in your mix. It can lead to similar problems of mix
translation.
This could be less significant in the mastering process, as the changes to sound there are usually broad changes to the whole mix, and one of the main goals of mastering is helping the mix translate well once it's released to the world. So working in an environment that more closely resembles real world listening environments might have a lot to recommend it.
The goal would be to try and standardize productions environments, and finding a happy medium between "live" or "dead" sounding spaces. This could probably be done, while keeping some of the qualities of the room that make it relatively "neutral" in it's overall sound.
I think it's a great idea, though it probably won't happen. Maybe at the highest levels of the audio post production system something like standardized room treatments can emerge. I think this practice is used to a degree for final mixes for movies. But a lot of music production is done in personal spaces, or small commercial studios that have been set up by an individual or small team. These endeavors are severely limited in budget. Yet they do contribute tremendously to the musical content that makes it out to the world.
The reason this problem is not more urgent is that the musical products we hear on a day to day basis, at home, in the car, playing in a store, wherever, are produced by highly skilled craftsmen, who have learned to create mixes in imperfect environments that translate well.