The View from 2006: This article, written in 1997, was the first time I really began to articulate my views on control room design in public. Since then, I've learned a lot, and I would like to refer you to "Making Loudspeakers Sound Good" and "Panoramic Power Response" after you finish this. Also, quite recently I've gotten an all too clear taste of how bad high frequency ceiling reflections are (our acoustic lens, happily, takes care of these for the most part). So I would add the advisory that you need to damp the ceiling for high frequency reflections, at least in the front of the room. For the rest of it, the article stands up pretty well. Enjoy!

The Goal of Control Room Monitoring

Deciding how to listen to the recordings we are making is one of the freakiest, maddening and downright confusing aspects of all audio work. To make it worse, we’re all in denial about it. Mostly we refuse to think about the problems that are inherent to loudspeakers in rooms, pretending instead that they’re all very cool, OK and under control, while we blithely blither on about how crummy 16-bit 44.1 kHz. digital sounds compared to 24-bit 96 kHz. digital! We are absolutely nuts!

There is very bad news here. If we do something even so trivial as moving our heads by a couple of inches(!) in the control room, we introduce frequency, phase and amplitude changes that, like, simply, totally, awesomely eclipse all of the errors that have accumulated in all of our beloved digital ‘n analog audio realms throughout the entire production process! Our monitoring system/environment is, by a huge amount, the most widely variable element in the entire production signal chain.

At the same time, our hearing system does some absolutely remarkable things that are not obvious to us. As part of our localization capability, we organize, edit and integrate the acoustical stuff we hear in ways that make great use of the chaos that is present in any reverberant environment. At the same time, we consciously perceive sound with a very comforting illusion of simple acoustical clarity. That this is all happening at once – the chaos, the editing, the illusion of clarity – is all very difficult to keep in mind, especially while we’re working.

What happens while we’re in production is simply that we hear stuff we like and dislike. We try to keep the good stuff while making the stuff we dislike tolerable. Meanwhile, we have to anticipate “how it will sound” to other people, over other loudspeakers, in other places. This makes us worry, leaving us quite vulnerable to hype.

We worry, we obsess. What are the best speakers for our control room? And what would be our best bet for a control room layout? What speakers did Froster use when he made Strayrock’s really elegant megahit “Ticklings?” Did Rumpelsnark really do GrungeKube’s 8-million-selling “Flexulance” on a boombox in an attic? Do we really need KroAk 4000 Ultra-Infrasonic Reference Monitors at $49,950 a pair? Or can we get by with Trendy’s Micromus 7s for $119 a case, like Cloudyplain does? Should we stuff Kimwipes in the ports like Earl-Scum does? Worry! Obsess!!

Time to take a deep breath . . . ommmmmmmm . . . and think about this. (much reverb)

What are we really trying to do in a control room? Make music, right? There are two completely separate and different monitoring tasks involved in that process.