should mixing and mastering be done in a "dead" room?

[distortedrumble]

i'm not completely sure how mixing and mastering in a room messes with the sound comming out of your monitors ....i mix and master(well halfass amateur too cheap to take it to a studio master) in my room which is my guesstimate 11x9x10 yeah i know that sounds odd...a little larger than a jail cell and about the size of a dorm room. speakers are on a desk in the corner and even though the room isnt exactly "dead" it doesnt seem to harm the mixes on my pc speakers. so whats the deal with where mixing and mastering should be? the pc speakers will be replaced with event 20/20s

 

[chessrock]

As long as you've got adequate broadband absorption going on, you should be fine. In other words, if a wide array of frequencies within the spectrum are equally "dead," from say 60 hz on up to 20 khz, then yea, dead is fine. Where dead isn't good is when certain frequency ranges are dead while others are very live. This throws things off balance, including your mixes.

 

[Blue Bear Sound]

Re:

...should mixing and mastering be done in a "dead" room?

No - it should be done in a sonically balanced room.

 

[mixmkr]

As long as you've got adequate broadband absorption going on, you should be fine. In other words, if a wide array of frequencies within the spectrum are equally "dead," from say 60 hz on up to 20 khz, then yea, dead is fine. Where dead isn't good is when certain frequency ranges are dead while others are very live. This throws things off balance, including your mixes.

is this different than sonically balanced?

 

[Blue Bear Sound]

...

 

[mixmkr]

damn!! I wasn't asking the "listmaker", but damn! My feelings are pretty hurt right now


some people can walk down the sidewalk and not even care if they step on an ant or not.

 

[nwsoundman]

mixmkr,

Yes to your last question. Sonicly balanced would consist of a balanced reverberation time across as wide of a frequency range as possible, not too dead not too alive. This is done by using whatever absorption and or diffusion is required.

If too much aborption is used at mid and high frequencies, what is typically happening in a "dead" room, it will be very hard to get reverb levels to translate, also your mixes will be a bit high end heavy. You see where this is going. There are also low end issues when the room is too dead or too live in the low end.

So even if your room has balanced absorption across lets say 125hz to 20khz but is very dead, too short reverberation times, your room is not "sonicly balanced".

Kirk

 

[Son of Mixerman]

is this different than sonically balanced?

Yes, dead infers to complete frequency null. Balanced means that every frequency is equally absorbed on a percentage value. Never 100%. But it also means that nodes are minimized so that the room is there, but neutral as far as how it feedsback to the mastering engineer. Mastering rooms are a different animal than control rooms and its more difficult to make an all in one room than it is to perfect a control or mastering room on their own. No room is perfect either.


SoMm

 

[distortedrumble]

thanks for answering that my room will do just fine