Thanks to visit codestin.com
Credit goes to www.scribd.com

0% found this document useful (0 votes)
85 views9 pages

Making Space: The SOS Guide To Control Room Design

Uploaded by

Cássio
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
0% found this document useful (0 votes)
85 views9 pages

Making Space: The SOS Guide To Control Room Design

Uploaded by

Cássio
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 9

Making Space 3/17/16, 14:01

Sound On Sound : Est. 1985

In this article:
Making Space Out Of Control

The SOS Guide To Control Room Design Non-environment Rooms


Live End Dead End
Published in SOS February 2015 Reflection-Free Zone &
Technique : Theory + Technical : Close window Controlled Image Design
Print article
Ambechoic Designs
Final Remarks
All About That Bass
Glossary
References

Photo: Hannes Bieger

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

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb15/articles/control-rooms.htm?print=yes Page 1 of 9
Making Space 3/17/16, 14:01

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.

Non-environment rooms have loudspeakers that are flush-mounted, so that the


sound emerging from them is not reflected from the front wall, while the rear,
Figure 2: The impulse
sides and ceiling of the room are highly absorbent. The combined effect of response in a small critical
these treatments is that sound from the loudspeakers is absorbed instead of listening room before (top)
being reflected, so that only the direct sound is heard by the listener. There is and after treatment
(bottom). (After Cox and
potentially a reflection from the hard floor, but for the sound engineer, the floor
D’Antonio, Acoustic
reflection from the sound playing out of the loudspeaker is usually unimportant, Absorbers And Diffusers,
because the mixing desk is in the way of that sound path. Like the floor, the Spon Press, 2009.)
front wall (in which the speakers are mounted) is not absorbing. This means
that the acoustic environment, although dead from the loudspeaker’s viewpoint, is not perceived as
oppressively dead, because there are two hard surfaces that reflect conversation and other sounds made
within the room back to whoever is working in the room.

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

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb15/articles/control-rooms.htm?print=yes Page 2 of 9
Making Space 3/17/16, 14:01

makes this impractical for a home studio. Figure 4 shows a


comprehensive non-environment room implementation.

A further problem is that because non–environment rooms have no


reverberant field, only the direct sound is available to provide sound
level — there is no support for the loudspeaker level. In a typical
domestic environment at normal listening distances, by contrast, the
reverberant field is about 10dB greater than the direct sound. Thus
in a non-environment room one must use either 10 times the power
amplifier level, or specialist loudspeaker systems with a greater
efficiency, to reproduce the same sound levels. Another criticism that
has been voiced by some is that sound engineers working in a non-
environment have the additional difficulty of translating what they
hear in a dead space, where they are mixing, to the livelier acoustic
of typical domestic listening environments. Figure 3: Non-environment room design
in plan and section. (Adapted from
There is also a potential obstacle to the idea of creating a surround- Howard and Angus, Acoustics And
compatible non-environment space. Some have just added rear Psychoacoustics, Focal Press, 2009.)
loudspeakers without additional treatment. A proper
adherence to the design concept, however, would require the
front wall to be made absorbing so that the surround
loudspeakers radiate into a dead space. This further
increases the amount of room volume taken up with
treatment.

Live End Dead End


One way of reducing the amount of absorption and mitigating
the high power levels needed for a non-environment is to
Figure 4: A no-expense-spared non-
retain the reverberant tail in the control room, and suppress
environment control room — Studio 3 at BOP in
only the first-order reflections that cause the most coloration. South Africa, designed by Tom Hidley.
This will lengthen the time between the direct sound and the
first significant room reflection, so that the room sounds bigger. Many studio designs try to achieve this
goal, the simplest one being the Live End Dead End (LEDE) design proposed by Davies and Davies in
1980.

The concept is simple and is shown in Figure 5. Broadband


absorbers supress all the reflections from the front half of the
room close to the loudspeakers, creating a ‘dead end’. The
back half of the room forms the ‘live end’, which is left
untreated. In some implementations, with flush-mounted
loudspeakers, the front wall can also be left untreated as is
done in non-environments. Also, in most implementations,
some form of diffuser is placed on the rear wall to improve Figure 5: An LEDE control room.
the performance of the live end of the room by breaking up
the strong reflection from the rear wall.

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

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb15/articles/control-rooms.htm?print=yes Page 3 of 9
Making Space 3/17/16, 14:01

(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.

Reflection-Free Zone & Controlled Image Design


The two methods described so far use brute force to suppress early reflections. Although this has some
advantages, especially in the case of the non-environment room, they are impractical for many rooms due
to the amount of treatment that is required. A better approach is to only put treatment where it is needed,
and this is the principle behind design philosophies such as Reflection-Free Zone and Controlled Image
Design rooms. But how can one tell where the treatment should be placed? Figure 6 shows one way of
working out where treatment should be placed to control
early reflections. The idea is to imagine that the relevant
walls, or ceilings, are mirrors. Then you can create ‘image
rooms’ that show the direction of the earliest reflections. By
defining a reflection-free zone around the listening position,
and by drawing lines from the image loudspeakers, one can
see which portions of the wall need to be made absorbent.
The absorber in these locations only needs to treat the mid- Figure 6: How the image method can help you
to high frequencies that have the strongest effect on creating work out where to place treatment. (Adapted
from Howard and Angus, Acoustics And
stereo images and coloration; bass frequencies are Psychoacoustics, Focal Press, 2009.)
considered separately (see box). If the room is already built,
you can find the locations by moving a real mirror along the walls and finding out where the reflected image
of the loudspeakers can be seen from the reflection-free zone to determine the locations for the absorbers.
Treatment should be arranged symmetrically, about the centre line of the room, because all control rooms
should be symmetrical for correct imaging. The construction in Figure 6 is easy to do for a rectangular
room. The concept also works for more complicated room shapes, but the diagram is harder to construct. It
can also be applied to surround systems, the only real difference being the number of sources you need to
keep track of.

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.

The Controlled Image Design uses surfaces to redirect


reflections, using more complex curves that allow
loudspeakers to be free-standing and not flush-mounted, as
shown in Figure 8. One advantage of this technique is that
there are places where absorption is unnecessary. This is
useful because it shows you where to place doors and
windows that are difficult to make absorptive. These ideas
can also be applied vertically, to produce a concave faceted
curve of the front wall as it rises to the ceiling. A problem with Figure 7: Plan of a Reflection-Free Zone design.
shaping the walls is that doing so makes the room much (Adapted from Cox and D’Antonio, Acoustic
Absorbers And Diffusers, 2009.)
more complicated to construct: a bog-standard cuboid is
much easier to make! A more pernicious problem is that, because the
reflections are redirected rather than being absorbed, the listening
quality deteriorates rapidly as you move away from the reflection-free
zone due to increased number of reflections. To mitigate this, the rear
wall can be treated with absorbers to remove reflections or diffusers to
disperse and scatter sound.

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

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb15/articles/control-rooms.htm?print=yes Page 4 of 9
Making Space 3/17/16, 14:01

absorption needed, one should make the listening area as small as


possible because larger reflection-free volumes require larger
absorption patches. Moving between absorption and diffusion on a
particular surface also affects the size of sonic images. If absorption is
used to remove early reflections, especially near the loudspeakers, then
the sonic images in the sound stage will be small, as if sound comes
from a point in space. If diffusers are used, the sonic images may be
broader, more like a typical home listening environment.

In terms of practicality, the Reflection-Free Zone or Controlled Image


Design are probably the best options for a home studio, using treatment
in a cuboid room rather than attempting complicated shaping of the front
and side walls. The pure absorption approach, where the necessary
treatment is achieved solely by absorption, is probably the most
practical in the home studio where space is limited. Figure 8: Plan for a Controlled
Image Design room.
Ambechoic Designs
Instead of absorbing every reflection, as in the non-
environment room, another approach is to diffuse every
reflection by putting broadband diffusers on every surface,
except the floor. In such a room, the impulse response looks
like that shown in Figure 11, with a dense set of reflections all
at a reduced level. Over a large part of the room the
reflections are at least 20dB below the direct sound.

In an untreated room with flat surfaces, the sound arrives at a


specific time and level having been reflected from a surface. Figure 9: The control room at Diante Do Trono
An example was seen in the top of Figure 2 with the Studios in Brazil, created by the Walters-Storyk
Design Group, uses angled side walls, plus
reflections from the side wall, floor and ceiling of an untreated
combinations of absorption and diffusion on the
room. In an ambechoic, every surface is covered with ceiling and rear walls, to create a reflection-free
diffusers. From the point of view of a listener at a specific zone. Note that the speakers are flush-mounted
place in an ambechoic, sound no longer arrives from a single within a huge glass surface, which prevents the
control room sounding ‘dead’ to the engineer.
point on the wall, but from all locations across the wall as
Photo: WSDG
shown in Figure 12. These many reflection paths are all of
different and longer distances than the specular path (shown
in red). As a consequence, gaps that used to exist between
strong sparse reflections, with flat walls, are filled with a
dense set of low–level early reflections. These are less
intense, because the diffuser spreads its energy over a
hemisphere. This is why using diffusers instead of absorbers
can sometimes be beneficial.

The diffuse reflections are low enough in amplitude to have


no effect on the stereo image. There is also a large reduction
in the coloration that would otherwise occur in an untreated Figure 10: This writing room at The Church
room. This is due to both the reduction in amplitude due to Studios uses precisely shaped and positioned
the diffusion and the smoothing of frequency response surfaces — most notably the curved reflector at
the left — to control reflections within the room.
caused by the multiplicity of time delays present in the sound
Photo: WSDG
arriving from the diffuser. The fact that the reflections are
diffuse also results in an absence of focusing effects away
from the optimum listening position and this should result in a more gradual degradation of the listening
environment away from the sweet spot.

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.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb15/articles/control-rooms.htm?print=yes Page 5 of 9
Making Space 3/17/16, 14:01

Another embodiment is the MyRoom principle by Petrovic


and Davidovic, which uses diffusers placed in front of
absorption to achieve a similar result. The diffusers are not
completely solid and so allow some sound, especially the
bass, to reach the absorbent. Yet another variation is the
Early Sound Scattering control room (ESS), which reverses
the role of absorption and diffusion in the LEDE type of room
and instead puts all the diffusion at the front around the
stereo loudspeakers and the absorption, if required, at the
back of the room behind the listener. Again this should
achieve similar results.
Figure 11: The impulse response in Blackbird
Studio C. (After Cox and D’Antonio, Acoustic
In terms of practicality, all these approaches use large Absorbers And Diffusers, 2009.)
numbers of diffusers and so are difficult to achieve in a home
studio. Diffusers need to be at least a quarter of a wavelength deep to be fully effective, which means that
you would need about 200mm-deep diffusers, about the depth of a bookcase, all around the room to
achieve diffusion down to 500Hz. To get to bass frequencies, diffusers have to be even deeper, and the
building has to be very solidly constructed to take the weight of the treatment.

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/

All About That Bass


Coloration at low frequencies is caused by the room modes. A room mode is a resonance of the air
within the space, and its frequency is related to the dimensions of the room. For any loudspeaker
configuration, room and listener location, there will be many modes that are excited, and are easy to see
as peaks and dips in a frequency spectrum such as the one in Figure 14. With music, these modes
cause amplification of some notes and attenuation of others. With transient sounds, it is easy to hear
resonances ringing on after the note has ended. This creates muddiness, commonly affecting the
precision of bass notes, kick drum or the low-register instruments in orchestras.

Solutions that were popular in the early stages of


control-room design included splaying of the walls, and
employing room aspect ratios that were supposed to be
optimal in sustaining a well-behaved low-frequency
response. Splaying the room walls is effective in
reducing the problem of flutter echoes — a distinct
ringing effect caused by repeated bouncing of sound
between parallel walls — but it has very little effect on
room modes. To be effective, the splaying of walls would
need to be substantial compared to the wavelength of
low-frequency sound, meaning rooms would have to be Figure 12: A diffuser supplies reflections from all
parts of the wall. The red sound path indicates
very much narrower at one end than the other, which is the reflection path for a flat wall.
obviously not feasible. The so-called ‘golden room ratios’
that defined the optimal aspect ratio of the rooms were also very popular for a while, but recent research
has shown that these are of secondary importance relative to other means of control (Fazenda et al,
2005). Unless you are treating a room with the worst modal distribution, such as might happen in a cubic
room, it is not worth rebuilding a room to get golden aspect ratios.
The frequency balance of the bass in a room is dependent both on the position of the listener and of the

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb15/articles/control-rooms.htm?print=yes Page 6 of 9
Making Space 3/17/16, 14:01

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.

The same set of principles applies to systems with two


subwoofers or systems with full–range loudspeakers
(stereo or surround), but the interaction with the room
modes is more complex. In general, you will still be able
to hear the differences when you move the loudspeakers
but the approach needs to be a bit more careful. If using
subwoofers, try to position them symmetrically to the line
bisecting the room as you look at the mixing desk. You
can move them symmetrically in or out of this line or
together front-back along the room. If using full-range
Figure 13: Blackbird Studio C — an ambechoic
loudspeakers, say in a stereo system, you will need to
design.
relocate your listening position accordingly.
The most typical room acoustic treatment to address low-frequency modes is absorption. Diffusers can,
in theory, change the modal behaviour in a room, but would need to be impractically large to do so. A
room that allows most energy to escape through the walls — which is quite common with thin
plasterboard constructions — has a better behaved low–frequency response than a room where the
walls are heavy and made of brick, keeping all the energy reflecting within the space. Having thin walls
or no walls at all is the best form of low-frequency control, the problem being that the bass response is
solved at the expense of your neighbour’s sanity!
More practical solutions require efficient low-frequency
absorbers. Foam panels would typically need to be at
least a metre thick to get significant absorption at low
frequencies, so a resonant type of absorber is typically
necessary, with membrane designs being most common
in small rooms. Some manufacturers will sell these
tuned to a narrow frequency range around which they
will work most effectively. These work best when placed
on the walls and more specifically near the corners or
cornices of the room. A considerable surface area
covered with these is still required to get a significant Figure 14. The low-frequency spectrum within
the listening room of the University of Salford
reduction in booming. One or two are not usually enough before treatment. (After Cox and D’Antonio,
even in the smallest of rooms, which makes the bass Acoustic Absorbers And Diffusers, 2009.)
treatment one of the most expensive aspects of room
design. Strips of resonant absorbers on the walls near the floor and ceiling are a good solution that
leaves enough remaining wall area at ear height to place the acoustic panels used to deal with early
reflections and reverberation. A very typical and comfortable solution is to place a large, soft couch at
the back of the room!

Glossary

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb15/articles/control-rooms.htm?print=yes Page 7 of 9
Making Space 3/17/16, 14:01

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

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb15/articles/control-rooms.htm?print=yes Page 8 of 9
Making Space 3/17/16, 14:01

We accept the following payment methods in our web Shop:

All contents copyright © SOS Publications Group and/or its licensors, 1985-2016. All rights reserved.
The contents of this article are subject to worldwide copyright protection and reproduction in whole or part, whether mechanical or electronic, is expressly forbidden without the prior written consent of the
Publishers. Great care has been taken to ensure accuracy in the preparation of this article but neither Sound On Sound Limited nor the publishers can be held responsible for its contents.
The views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the publishers.

Web site designed & maintained by PB Associates | SOS | Relative Media

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb15/articles/control-rooms.htm?print=yes Page 9 of 9

You might also like