Making Space: The SOS Guide To Control Room Design
Making Space: The SOS Guide To Control Room Design
In this article:
Making Space Out Of Control
Getting the sound in your mix space right is crucial. But what is ‘right’,
and how do you achieve it?
Bruno Fazenda, Jamie Angus, Trevor Cox
Imagine you are creating the control room of a studio, and have the luxury of employing professionals to
design and build the space to have great acoustics. Depending on who you went to, you might get offered
one of a number of different design philosophies, such as Live End Dead End (LEDE), non-environment or
Reflection-Free Zone (RFZ). But which is best? This guide compares different design philosophies,
explaining how each affects the sound in the room and what the engineer hears as they work at the desk.
As most of us do not have the budget to use professionals, we will also look at how the design ideas can
be adapted for someone creating a studio through DIY.
Rooms have a significant effect on what we hear, and this happens for all types of loudspeaker
reproduction — stereo or surround. Acoustic engineers will talk about the room causing ‘coloration’: a
change in the frequency balance of the sound, with some frequencies being boosted while others are
suppressed. At low frequencies, the inherent resonances of the room are the cause of this coloration, with
the most audible effect being a booming of certain bass notes. At mid to high frequencies, coloration is
caused by the interference between the sound reflected from the walls, floor and ceiling, and the sound
coming direct from the loudspeaker to the listener. This is most evident as changes in the timbre of musical
notes. Early reflections can also create problems with imaging, causing the exact location of sounds in your
mix to become broad and blurred, and in extreme cases, being pulled away from their intended location in
the stereo image. Rooms also have reverberance that causes a sound to linger, adding a ‘bloom’ that, in a
well-designed room, subtly reinforces notes. A complete lack of reverberation sounds unnatural, but at the
other extreme, too much reverberation can prevent aberrations from being audible to the sound engineer,
leading to problems with the mix being overlooked.
Out Of Control
Consider a studio engineer mixing in a control room that is smaller than the live room where the musicians
are performing. The ideal control room should have a neutral acoustic where the sound engineer can ‘listen
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through’ to the acoustical environment of the live room. Unfortunately, if the control room is much smaller
than the live space and lacks acoustic treatment, this is not possible. Figure 1 shows what the engineer
hears in the control room when a short sharp sound is made
by a musician in the live room — something like a single hit
on a snare drum. The first room effect the sound engineer
hears is due to a reflection from a wall in the control room,
rather than something from the acoustic of the live space.
This is because the ITD, the Initial Time Delay, which is the
time between the direct sound (which, in the control room, is
coming from the loudspeakers) and the first reflection from a
Figure 1: The impulse response heard by the
wall, is smallest in the control room. Because our brain sound engineer in the control room, when a
prioritises what it hears first, the sound will be perceived as short sharp impulsive sound is made in a larger
coming from a space the size of the smaller control room live space. Red indicates the reflections and
reverberation arising from the smaller control
(unless the live space is extremely reverberant). room, and blue from the larger live space.
(Adapted from Howard and Angus, Acoustics
What we need to do is make the sound appear to be coming And Psychoacoustics, Focal Press, 2009.)
from the live space by suppressing the early-arriving
reflections from the walls of the control room, so that the sound engineer hears the ITD from the larger live
space. Figure 2 shows measured impulse responses within a small listening space before and after
treatment — in this case as a Reflection-Free Zone control room. Before treatment, the direct sound and
sparse early reflections from the room stand out. After treatment, there is an initial time delay gap before
the reflections from the control room arrive. The application of diffusers on the rear wall that scatter sound
turn the sparse room reflections into something more like the reverberant decay of a larger room, with
increased reflection density.
Reflection-Free Zones (RFZ) (D’Antonio and Konnert, 1984) are not the only
way of improving small room acoustics. Other approaches include the non-
environment (Newell, 2008); live end dead end (LEDE) (Davies and Davies,
1980), and controlled image design (Walker, 1993, 1998).
Non-environment Rooms
One approach to controlling early reflections is to suppress them via absorption.
A ‘non-environment’ approach goes even further and removes the reverberation
as well as the early reflections, to create a quite dead acoustic. This design
philosophy has been successfully applied to many control rooms. How this is
achieved is shown in Figure 3.
Proponents of non-environment designs say that the lack of anything but the direct sound makes it much
easier to hear low-level detail in the reproduced audio due to the removal of any masking reverberation and
other room effects. Furthermore, the rooms provide excellent, pin-point stereo imaging; this is almost
certainly due to the removal of any conflicting cues in the sound, such as early reflections or reverberation.
On the down side, creating non–environment rooms requires broadband absorbers that can take up a
considerable amount of space. In commercially designed non-environment rooms, the absorbent often
occupies more than half the room volume! However, it is possible to use membrane absorbers to achieve
sufficient broadband absorption with a depth of 30cm. This allows the technique to be applied in much
smaller rooms whose area is approximately 15 square metres. Even so, the amount of treatment required
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Treating the room this way has a lot of advantages. Firstly, it is cheaper than a non–environment because
there is less treatment, and the loudspeakers are driven less hard because there is a reverberant field
available to boost the volume. The reverberation time is set by the amount of absorption used in the dead
end. This reverberation can be set to be closer to a home listening environment. It is also possible to have
loudspeakers mounted away from the front wall if that is desired.
However, there are disadvantages. An LEDE design presents two distinct acoustics — one live, one dead
— and so the sound changes as you move around the room. The mix will sound very different to the
engineer at the desk, compared to others auditioning the recording elsewhere in the room. The sweet spot
where a good acoustic is achieved is quite small.
The LEDE philosophy is easier to implement at home than a non-environment room because less
treatment is needed. Also, the absorbent controlling the earlier reflections can be shallower than is used in
a non-environment, although you would also need membrane absorbers elsewhere to control the bass
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(low-frequency control will be discussed in detail later). However, there are ways of controlling early
reflections with less absorption to get a much bigger sweet spot. One disadvantage of LEDE rooms is that
the philosophy is not easily extended to deal with surround sound reproduction. A different design is
needed, like those outlined next.
If you are building a room from scratch, rather than applying treatment to an existing space, a reflection-
free zone can be achieved by angling the walls. Once you know which regions need to be treated, you
angle the walls to redirect the sound away from the listening area. An example of this type of RFZ room is
shown in Figure 7, where the speakers are flush-mounted in
the front of the room next to splayed walls that redirect the
sound away from the listening area, thus removing the early
reflections.
On any particular surface, there is a choice about whether to apply absorbers to remove a reflection or a
diffuser to disperse the sound. This choice is partly down to the desired amount of reverberance in the
room, which sets the total amount of absorption that can be used around the space, and so might well limit
how many panels can be absorbent. To minimise the amount of
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Blackbird Studio C is based on these principles and is shown in Figure 13. The experience of this room is
that one is unaware of sound reflection from the walls: it sounds almost anechoic, yet it has reverberation!
Stereo and multi-channel material played in this room has images that are stable over a wide listening
area. This type of room is also good for recording in as the high level of diffuse reflections helps to both
integrate the sound of acoustic instruments and give acoustic feedback to the musicians.
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Final Remarks
When considering which room design philosophy to follow, it is important to consider your own personal
preferences. One of the reasons so many different control–room designs have emerged is because there is
not one perfect acoustic solution for a control room. If you have access to other studios, then you should do
as architects do before building grand concert halls: do a listening tour to find out which style of control
room sounds best to you.
http://www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk/
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loudspeakers. A simple test for this effect is to get your digital audio workstation (DAW) to generate a
single low-frequency tone and walk around. You’ll be able to hear the sound changing. For the very low
frequencies, you’ll find a couple of loudest and quietest points around the room. All loudspeakers sound
bassier when placed near the walls, so the best starting positions are usually about 1 metre from any
wall, as long as room size allows. As a consequence, positions too close to the corners are not
advisable. Some of the high-end monitor speakers have built-in filters that allow some control of this
interaction and need to be used if the speakers are to be placed close to walls or desks.
The good news is that loudspeaker position is usually within the control of the user of a domestic studio.
Low frequencies are generally considered to contribute little to the localisation of sources of sound
(although this is not the case when we consider real-life sources, it applies to stereo and surround
reproduction systems) and, as many monitoring systems now rely on the use of a subwoofer to generate
the low frequencies, you can optimise subwoofer placement to obtain a better response by trial and
error. You can try sitting at your usual listening position and getting a friend to move the subwoofer
around the room while you listen to a track with a fairly steady bass line. Movements of half a metre or
more are most effective. (Using reciprocity, you can make this process less of a workout. Place the
subwoofer at the normal listener position and then walk around to find the place with the optimal bass
response. This is where the subwoofer should be placed.) Subwoofers should not be placed too far
away from your main speakers, in order to avoid large time differences between the low and high
frequencies arriving at the listening position.
Glossary
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Absorber: A treatment that attenuates sound, such as an acoustic foam panel used to remove a
reflection.
Broadband absorber: Acoustic treatment that absorbs all of the audible frequency range in one device.
Coloration: An audible change in timbre, usually caused by early reflections.
Control room: The room where the sound engineer creates the mix.
Controlled image design: A control-room design philosophy where surfaces are angled and absorbers
applied to attenuate or delay the early arriving reflections.
Dead acoustic: A space with a very large amount of absorption so that there are very few room
reflections (antonym: live acoustic).
Diffuser: A bumpy surface that causes reflected sound to be scattered in many different directions.
Direct sound: The sound that travels directly from a loudspeaker or other source to the listener. It is not
altered by the room.
Early reflections: Sound that has reflected from one or more room surfaces (such as walls), and in a
control room arrives a few milliseconds after the direct sound.
Impulse response: The response measured on a microphone when a short sharp sound is made
elsewhere in a room. Shows the direct sound and the pattern of subsequent room reflections, and so
allows the quality of a room to be gauged.
Initial time delay (ITD): The time between the sound arriving directly from the loudspeakers and from
the first reflection of a room surface (such as the floor).
Live End Dead End (LEDE): A control–room design philosophy where the front of the room is highly
absorptive while the rear of the room has little absorption.
Live room: A space where musicians are playing and being recorded.
Membrane absorbers: A bass absorber where a membrane, such as a piece of hardboard or vinyl,
vibrates against a spring formed by the air inside a box.
Non-Environment: A control-room design philosophy where large amounts of absorption remove all
room reflections that would otherwise arise from the sound radiated by the loudspeakers.
Reflection-Free Zone (RFZ):
(1) A control-room design philosophy where absorbers and diffusers are used to attenuate or disperse
the early-arriving reflections.
(2) The best monitoring region in the control room, where the early-arriving reflections are suppressed.
Reverberation: the cumulative effect of the many reflections that, for small rooms, arrive tens of
milliseconds and more after the direct sound. Reverberation causes sound to linger for a short while
after notes have finished.
Room mode: A resonance of the air within a room that amplifies sounds close to a particular frequency.
Most audible when bass notes ring on for too long.
Sweet spot: The region within a room where the highest-quality monitoring is achieved.
References
Davies, D., Davies, C., The LEDE concept for the control of acoustic and psychoacoustic parameters in
recording control rooms. J. Audio Eng. Soc. 28 (3), 585595 (November 1980).
Cox, T. J. and D’Antonio, P. Acoustic Absorbers and Diffusers, second ed, Taylor & Francis, 2009.
D’Antonio, P., Konnert, J.H., The RFZ/RPG approach to control-room monitoring. Audio Engineering
Society 76th Convention, October, New York, USA, preprint #2157, 1984.
Fazenda, B. M., Avis, M. R., & Davies, W. J. (2005). Perception of modal distribution metrics in critical
listening spaces — dependence on room aspect ratios. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society,
53(12), 1128-1141.
Howard, D. and Angus, J.A.S., Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 4th Edition, Focal Press, 2009.
Newell, P., Recording Studio Design, second ed, Focal Press, Oxford, 2008.
B.Petrovic, Z.Davidovic, Acoustical Design of Control Room for Stereo and Multichannel Production
and Reproduction — A Novel Approach, 129th AES Convention, San Francisco, 2010.
Walker, R., A new approach to the design of control room acoustics for stereophony. Audio Engineering
Society Convention, preprint #3543, 94, 1993.
Walker, R., A controlled-reflection listening room for multichannel sound. Audio Engineering Society
Convention, preprint #4645, 104., 1998.
Published in SOS February 2015
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