# House curves for recording studio control rooms....



## Max Dread (Oct 20, 2010)

Hi there 

I just read with interest the stocky about house curves. I am in the middle of designing my home studio and taking measurements.... I must admit that the idea of a house curve is a new one on me - one that I have not come across on forums dedicated to recording studio CR acoustics. Usually the goal is stated as getting as flat a response as possible, and +/-3dB is regarded as a great achievement. I'm not saying it has not discussed/supported/refuted on these forums - just that I have not tuned into ot come across such discussions.

So it was with interested that I read:

*A house curve built into recordings?
One thought critical of house curves is based on a rather idealistic concept of the recording studio environment and exactly how it affects our program material. The following is from a house curve discussion thread a few years ago on another Forum:

”Consider a properly set up mixing booth in a studio. The mixing engineer is listening to either nearfield monitors or other speakers when he is laying out the final 'sound' of the music that is being mixed down to two (or more) channels. If the physical space and hardware has been designed properly (including the choice/location/EQ of the monitoring speakers), the frequency response at the mixing position should be flat from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Neither the booth nor the mixing electronics should add or subtract from the sound on the master tape. If you wish for your home system to be accurate, it needs to be as flat as the one they used in the studio.”

Here’s the problem with this idea: If the mixing engineer’s monitoring system is as flat as all that, it will sound as bad to him as it does in your living room! There’s no way around it; a properly-tuned studio monitoring system will also have an appropriate house curve for the room it’s in. It has to. If not, the engineer is simply going to compensate with equalization. Good engineers know that their room and speakers of choice will affect their final mix. That’s why they usually demo it in different environments before they finalize it." *

I would really interested in to hear further thoughts on this...

Cheers

Max


----------



## Wayne A. Pflughaupt (Apr 13, 2006)

I’m afraid there aren’t any cut-and-dried answers for a studio control room, Max. A house curve is for optimizing the sound system’s response for the room, for the purposes of playing back recorded music and movies. The control room situation is different, since it’s the place where music is produced. 

The concept of a house curve is accepted in the movie industry (i.e., the X curve that is used for both production facilities and movie theaters), but it doesn’t seem to be _de rigueur_ in music production circles. Probably because there is so much variation from one control room to the next, which makes it impossible to have a _defacto_ standard like the movie biz does. 

I’ve dabbled a bit with mixing down multi-track recordings in a small control room, so I know it can be a challenge getting the bass to sound right once you take your product from the studio to a good car or home system. A problem with small control rooms and home studios is that the engineer is often situated near the center of the room, which is a bass “hole” or “dead zone.” 

You can probably get better advice at the recording-hobbyist forums, but my best suggestion is to try your product on a number of different good-quality systems – home, car, etc. - that you know are well-calibrated, and keep making changes in your mix and EQ until it sound good in most places you take it. From there you can either calibrate your system to sound like the others, or else simply mix being familiar with your studio system’s limitations, for example knowing that if it sounds bass-heavy in the control room that means it’ll sound about right everywhere else.

Regards,
Wayne


----------

