Monitoring – room for Improvement

 

The basic principles of control room design -By Dave Moulton

Most of the articles we read on acoustic design of control rooms and studios seem to center around materials we might use to treat wall surfaces, including some tips about using those materials for fun and profit. In this article, I’d like to take a different approach, and present what I believe to be some basic principles of control room design.

You’ll find that these are actually pretty straightforward, and you can apply them almost anywhere, including your own home studio. And where you can’t apply them successfully, you’ll hopefully come to understand a little better what sort of problems you have, and how to cope with them more effectively.

I first came up with this list of principles while preparing for participation on a panel on “Small Room Acoustics” for AES. It occurred to me that we don’t usually think about what it is that we want to get out of our control rooms, even though that is what’s really important. For those of you who are interested, the whole presentation is available on my website at http://moultonlabs.com/slides/ smallrooms/index.htm

Anyway, I’ve got seven principles that need to be addressed in the construction of any control room, including your bedroom, basement, minivan or closet.