Listening To Basic Recordings In Studios

The basic design solution in recording studios is to install monitors that we hope can accurately mimic the physical reality of the acoustic recording studio. They need to play loud enough to match any sound level we may wish to record and be flat and clean enough to let the signal strongly resemble its acoustic ancestor. We put them in walls (called soffits) to cut down on interference effects and we treat the control room to suppress as much of its acoustical character as possible. Truth be known, we'd really like the control room to be an anechoic chamber, except that anechoic chambers are really expensive and too weird to reliably produce music in. (I personally know this is true because I spent a weekend listening to stereo recordings in one. Very interesting. I'll tell you about it sometime.) Anyway, we try to neutralize the sound of the control room without losing all the reverberance.

The result, at its best, is a monitoring system that permits you to really hear out the sonic detailing of the basic acoustic tracks you are recording. If you have an NC-20 noise floor and a monitor system flat across at least nine octaves with less than .1% distortion at 120 dB SPL, the audio window available to you is a fairly close match with acoustical reality. The downside of this is that such rooms and levels are unrelated to conventional music playback, and mix decisions made under these monitoring conditions may not sound good over end-user systems.

In-your-face Mixing and Editing

Producers' solution to the above problem has been to lug in small mid-fi bookshelf speakers and set them up on the meter bridge of the console. "Near-field monitoring®," it's been called and even trademarked. An alternative term proposed by Lorenz Rychner of Recording Magazine is "In-your-face monitoring." This is both more accurate, as you aren't actually in the near field of the speakers in question, and poetic as well.

In-your-face monitors resemble the range of consumer loudspeakers much more realistically than do the main monitors in most studios. They also give the producer an additional comfort factor: she can use the same speaker in every studio in which she works, eliminating one very big variable. Even with the limitations of such speakers (they can't do much below 80 Hertz and/or they can't play very loud), they can be used to make extremely successful hit records, as Bob Clearmountain demonstrated with the Yamaha NS10 and Gary Katz also did with Visoniks for the Steely Dan recordings.

One variation on this theme that bears particular noting is the Auratone speaker. "Monitors for the Real World," it says on the carton they come in. Auratones are mediocre little one-way boxes selling for around $125 a pair that reliably stand in for all of the crummy table radios, boom boxes, and other implements of low-fi mayhem that are out there. Personally, I find them indispensable.