Monitoring

Room Calibration, Monitoring & Adjusting Your Final Output

There are a number of solutions available today to help you make sure what you are actually producing is what others will hear when the music leaves the room and is played on any device. This is important because the sound can be 'coloured' by the type of playback device. We all have our favourite speakers or headphones but it is important in the studio that what we output will sound the same on all playback devices before its individual colouration.

To achieve this we highly recommend installing a room calibration solution so that you can setup your room correctly, monitor your music live and of course, your final output.

These systems generally have the same approach but the way they are used can vary and of course, they all produce varying results. You can spend just a couple €hundred or several €thousand depending on the features you want, for example, at the top end you can buy the Trinnov DMon system which integrates with EUCON and therefore plugs straight into ProTools, whereas at the lower end, most systems work as DAW plug-ins.

Room Calibration

Getting this sorted once you have your room set up is a great idea. If you can have your system set up and do the calibration before your acoustic tiles are installed that is more preferable, but if you an aesthetic you absolutely have to have, then performing the setup when the room is ready is fine too.

It's actually a good discipline to have if you work with a portable setup, since you can perform this calibration in the different locations you use.

Quite simply the setup involves using a reference microphone in different positions so that the software can analyse how audio is behaving, compared to the perfect signal it has as a basis. You can buy a reference microphone to use independently from the software but you can also buy a package of 'Microphone and Software' and we really believe that's way to go.

Once you have performed a room calibration it's time to get back to producing music. During the production process you can constantly refer to your Digital Monitoring/Processing Software and make EQ adjustments for any fluctuations that occur, since your room calibration won't catch every occurrence of sonic expression. As we mentioned above, the higher end systems will do this for you and feed changes into your DAW for you.

Adjusting The Final Output

After all your great work getting your room calibrated and monitoring during the production process you still need to perform final checks on your music before you lock off that master. This is where this type of referencing software comes into its own in a way that we cannot possibly achieve without a painstaking process. Even then, we are no longer impartial so a little magic at this stage is welcome.

The mix check stage is a simple as opening the plugin on the master track and checking how it translates;ates when you select other simulated environments such as bluetooth headphones, in-car, portable speaker, club and more.

Overall....

Acoustics are important, your room configuration, ergonomics and aesthetics are important, but the bottom line is that your music output is the most important thing to consider. So setting the room up right and calibrating it well is absolutely the way to go. Continuing your new sonic discipline by adding Digital Referencing into your playbook at the mastering stage ensures you are achieving the best result you can.