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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.
I have some understanding and experience of what you are describing here. I still think the situation, which is as you describe it, is a gigantic amplification of the Circle of Confusion. You mention movie mixes, and while not always great, and only a modicum of standardization takes place, that has decreased the Circle of Confusion. Movies until recently also had to mix for a smaller range of likely listening environments.
When I listen to most current recordings highly skilled craftsmen is not the description that comes to mind. On the other hand, having worked with some recordings, yes those people do have real skills at mixing things. At least the few I've been around do need to get clued in that you don't have to squash it to death. When you can get them to back off on that a little their skill is even more apparent. Good things I've no skill to do myself. I suppose if not for their skills the squashed to death recordings would be far worse. But that smacks of a Sisyphean task to toil at to me.
I get that things aren't going back. I get at least a little why they are that way. I remember making a nice cassette dub of some of my favorite symphonies. My car was on the quieter side of average, but you couldn't enjoy those in the car. At least half the music was simply inaudible. Which is a variation on unlistenable, because you can't listen to what you cannot hear. Careful compression can make that kind of recording close to listenable in the car. But it can't ever really sound right. So yes even pop music needs some help for such environments. But I'm trying to figure out what environment most current recordings are for. They are squashed beyond what is needed in a car. Do that many people listen while working in a place as noisy as a steel mill? Some friends had an all acoustic Christmas lullaby returned to them with a DR6. You know slightly more loud than Metallica's Death Magnetic. I don't know anywhere such a mastering and mix translates. A couple of the musicians said they could not hear anywhere that sounded like their instrument.
I'm sorry for venting. I'm of course not blaming your personally. I think your description of the situation is accurate, and honest.