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In the never-ending search for accurate sound, we often turn to the latest and greatest studio reference monitors. We hope they'll help us craft better mixes and aid in our choice of mic placement. No doubt about it, honest monitors are a must for any serious work. But good acoustics are even more critical for hearing a truthful reproduction of our music.
Most untreated, small- to medium-sized rooms exhibit dramatic peaks and dips in frequency response that approach or exceed 10dB. Even the best, most expensive monitors in the world won't faithfully reproduce your mix in a room boasting the acoustics of a funhouse. In the control room, where you make all of your final mixdown decisions, acoustics are of paramount importance.
In this installment of our series on project studio acoustics, we'll give you step-by-step instructions for making your control room an accurate listening environment, starting with the best places to set up your gear. We'll furnish you with a blueprint for fixing aberrations in the frequency response, stereo imaging, and room reverb time so that your mixes translate well to other stereo systems. Computer software for analyzing your control room's acoustics will be briefly discussed. For those of you on a tight budget, we'll reveal how you can turn common household items into acoustical aids (see "Putting Household Items to Work" on page 75).
If you're just now joining us, I strongly recommend you read Parts 1 and 2 of this series (in the August and Fall 1999 issues, respectively). They laid the groundwork for understanding many of the concepts we'll refer to in this installment and in the upcoming Part 4.
SETTING UP YOUR SPEAKERS
Unless your control room is very wide, you'll want to set up with your speakers pointing down the length of the room. That way, the rear wall will be as far away from your mix position as possible. Sound reflections returning from the back of the room will be much quieter than the direct sound from the speakers, keeping comb filtering and imaging problems to a minimum.
Choose the most symmetrical end of the room as the front, where you'll put your speakers. You want your speakers set up in mirror images (e.g., if your left speaker...