The Range Rule

The Range Rule is one of three primary rules of scientific measurement and proof. It's the one that says you can't compare apples and oranges, and if you want to make a recording that is going to sound good in somebody's living room, the only way to make sure that's going to happen is to, well, listen to it in somebody's living room. The traditional studio control room environment isn't a living room and no amount of pretending is gonna make it sound like one.

So, I've tried to come up with a room that has as many of the aspects of a residential living room as I can reasonably manage, while maintaining sufficient flexibility and control of the audio and acoustics to be able to do production and research. By giving up on the making of acoustic recordings in my room, I am able to have a big control room with a pretty hospitable median plane, along with many characteristics of a large living room. A particular interest of mine involves wide-dispersion high-frequency lenses and high-frequency reverberation. To study these I need a fairly live room to which I can add absorption for testing purposes. I'm also trying to take the console, recorders, meter bridge, computer monitors, synths and stuff out of the acoustic picture as much as possible, along with the noise of cooling fans and disk drives (a separate article on that unhappy topic is coming), so that the room will sound and look pretty much like a nice big living room, in terms of furnishings, wall surfaces, etc.

My Approach To The End-User Problem

Given the broad range of end-user possibilities, I believe we need to work with several monitor systems and to listen to our work at multiple sound pressure levels. In mixdown, I try to stabilize this too-many-variables situation by making all of my actual fader moves and mix decisions while listening to only one set of speakers, set at my reference level of 90 dB SPL. During the mix process, however, I constantly check my work on other speakers and at other levels to hear how the mix sounds, and my decision-making process aims toward a music mix that sounds good over a range of systems, rather than great on just one.

I use my Mitsubishi Galant to check out car sound. It has a respectable stock system with radio, cassette and CD. For the other environments, I use an array of speakers and headphones. In the new room, I plan to provide for in-your-face meter-bridge speaker arrays, arrays at the far wall and out in the middle of the room.

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The room itself, with solid oak flooring and hardwood walls and ceilings, is quite live. Substantial glass areas will be reverberant at high frequencies but will function as traps at low frequencies. Thanks to the roof line and the large brick fire-place and chimney, resonant modes and flutter echoes are not a problem. I have sought to establish reasonable lateral symmetry by installing a built-in bookcase of similar size facing the fireplace.

The big effort, and this is still in the design stage, is to create custom desks into which to fit the console, synths, monitors 'n computers without adding acoustical interference patterns and/or obstruction of line-of-sight to the speakers, which may be on the floor in the middle of the room, at the far wall, or on stands by the meter bridge. I want artists, producers and guests to be able to sit comfortably with excellent monitoring, either in front of the console, at the console or at the wall behind the console. I want to keep everything below 36" from the floor for unobstructed hearing lines to the monitor arrays.