Yet Dr. Olive hasn’t been able to get standards adopted at AES, nor Dr. Toole before him on studio monitors.
I’m not sure why that is. Industry pushback, lack of consensus on what standard should be, other considerations? No studies (like in none, not a single solitary one) showing a correlation between monitors used and quality of end result? There are studies on the massive differences in playback sound in studio control rooms, but no standards.
Or maybe mixing engineers, the top tier who can command a production royalty, have never been tested at Harmon’s Northridge facility with multiple studio monitors to see if their preference for mixing monitors is the same as consumer preferences for consumer speakers.
Top tier mixing engineers are top tier for one reason, and one reason alone, their mixes sell records/downloads/physical media/get played on radio.
Then there are the unknowns, are the studio monitors used by the top tier being run flat in the control room (doubtful), or EQ’d, if so what EQ, what in room response.
All the proper controls are in place, after decades or refinement, for blind preference tests on consumer speakers. I don’t know of any equivalent for mixing engineers, or monitors in a control room setting, etc.
Dr. Toole, I believe, even up to the latest edition, spells out the circle of confusion problem, and says it’s surprising that it exists, but says studies are needed and more information is needed. The same for Dr. Olive, in a blog post from about 4 years ago, says need to start by getting a more standard control room.
What’s the update on where things are at with AES or other professional organization (acoustics or IEEE) on standards for control room monitors, or control rooms.
If my company made the flattest, most accurate, most (fill in blank) professional monitors available, I would be figuring out a way to demonstrate objectively how using them results in better mixes, better recordings, higher sales of music, more awards, etc.
It’s not there, studies, standards, manufacturer’s research, nothing. I don’t know why, but there isn’t, unless I have missed something that has come down the pike since the last 100+ page debate on this issue.
I've been a long time lurker on this forum and really appreciate what voice it brings to the internet audio community. I've worked in recording studios for 20+ years (my entire adult life), I've been a chief engineer at several facilities, freelanced for the last 15 years, built a litany of studios, and assisted in the building of several studios. All that to say, Hi thanks for having me.
Travis, there's a litany of reasons that standardization is/would be difficult. Secondarily, Dr. Olive and Dr. Toole, while they have some very good points in the circle of confusion, have acoustic theories so at odds with accepted fundamental concepts of control room design that they may not be the best arbiters of this task, regardless of if standardization would be a good idea or not.
As a mixing engineer(and I am one), you are constantly tasked with 1.) achieving the most translatable version of artist and producers vision, which is not always a walk in the park. This means it resembles the vision in car(ford or bmw), on a bluetooth speaker, on someone else's studio monitors, in a club on a PA, in headphones, in airpods, on someones 100k Wilson system as well as a set of sony bookshelf speakers. LOUD and soft. 2.) the expectation that it will be in step with the style of the times. This may mean making it able to be extremely limited in dynamic range, this may be making the widest dynamic range possible (genre dependent). 3.) doing all of the prior comfortably, quickly and on budget.
NOW, relevant to your post:
Standards (or reccomendations) have been talked about forever:
https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/tech/tech3276.pdf (40 sq meters rec sized room???? uhhh yahhh)
1.) CR acoustics are incredibly difficult to deal with in regard to FR. Consumer listening environments rarely share the same isolation (sound proofing) requirements a studio does. This matters because if it can be contained (isolated) it can be reflected meaning that it will interfere with speaker FR. Meaning treatment. Maybe not much? Maybe tons? Case dependentant. But very hard to accurately project that a spec is reachable in any given space.
For instance: +/- 5dB FR @ 24 dB an octave smoothing with 300 ms decay over 300 hz and 500 under 300.
At mix position, this is doable though some work sans DSP. With DSP? Definitely doable. 150 sq ft. of the area behind mix position? Good luck. That's work.
SO, if you were AES/EBU/ITU and wanted to profer a set of standards that rooms MUST meet, would you offer support? If some tells you to get f*cked, how do you enforce it? Major record labels only release records mixed in certain environments as agreed to with AES? Would you have a recommended method? Acoustician? If there was some variable that wasn't easily seen at the start of the project, and all steps were followed, what then? "Sorry your room doesn't meet spec, better luck next time! Good thing that was only 250k!". Would offer support to legacy studios who existed prior to the standard? I can think of some pretty prestigious rooms I've been in that wouldn't meet +/- 10 dB.
It's just a can of worms. For everyone. And to be clear I would love to live in the world where I could walk in ANY control room and immediately understand it.
2.) Mixers all have different perspectives regarding what makes them get to an end result that they like and translates. Everyone knows about the NS10 thing, right? "WELL YOU KNOW, Bob Clearmountain mixes on NS10s.." "BUT THEY SOUND LIKE POO AND HIS MIXES WOULD BE BETTER IF HE MIXED ON GENELECS". I mean, he has the money. As a matter of fact I think he has Dynaudio BM15s as an alt. Whatever. That gets him there.
TONS of records are being mixed and mastered on PMCs right now. Certainly not flat. But it works for them. I can't stand working on them.
Those reasons may not be correlated to the speakers flatness or even the FR in general. Some guys just like mixing with something that's brighter/midrangier/bassier cause it makes them sort through that range in a way that helps them make it translate more universally. I.E. If the speaker is harsh then the mixer will be more inclined to consider somethings harshness and handle it.
I, personally, don't like that approach, but I know TONS of people it works for.
For me, I have trouble mixing on modern Genelecs. But I can mix on Neumann 420s. The FR is similar, but the Genelecs always sound like the low end is too long to me (Very ancedotal).
All this to say, to codify all the above in order for it to be usable in a very broad range of circumstances and tastes just turns in to something thats not particularly meaningful like +/-10 db FR at mix position under 1 second of decay. It's a standard but not a very tight one.
Wooof. That was probably a lot.
Regarding current monitoring norms. Most professional mixers will have some reasonable space that at mix position will be +/- 5-7over 100 hz with no eq. Hopefully similar in the bottom octaves. But, there are also just freaks who somehow intuit how to deal with it(literally thinking of a friend who is a popular rock mixer). Generally, speaking under +/- 5 is considered REALLY good for control rooms(inclusive of speakers).
Ultimately the forever compromise of the recording studio environment is how isolated does it need to be vs frequency response vs when its all done does it aid people in making decent decisions. This is hard and filled with a litany of people who will take your money and run once the end result isn't what's promised. People with credentials. People with PHDs(for clarity this is not backhandedly referring to Dr. Toole or Olive). The best way through is enhanced study of: 1.) predictable methods of generating a specific result (I've been in multiple situations where professionals will promise this but never deliver) 2.) studying daily working professionals by changing individual variables such as speakers (and trying your damndest to match FR between your sets of speakers) then control rooms then analyzing the outcomes of the program vs their experience vs the client satisfaction to better understand what factors motivate the desired outcome.
