Yes. The mix room is where you need as accurate an audio environment as budget and space allow. Ideally you would treat both, but recording rooms are usually more live, and specific area treatment varies depending on instrument and genre. Often this is best addressed with moveable gobos, often with just absorption on one side and dispersion patterns over absorption on the other. Looking at your recording room, I’d want to build or buy some 4” by 4’ by 6’ moveable panels at some point. I don’t hear as much room in your recording as that open vocal mic would lead me to expect, so others see more of a serious problem there than do I.

The thing is, what Owen is trying to get across, is that there are measures you can take to offset the flaws in an imperfect control room.

Although yes of course you want a mix room with a flat (ish) response, it's not affecting the recorded sound.
It's only affecting how you hear the recorded sound.
This is something that can be compensated for, even if it's not ideal.

The bigger issue is that if the recording space is imparting unwanted artifacts into the recording, that is something that cannot be adjusted or compensated for at mix time.

You can't take the sound of the room out of the recording once you've printed.
But you can ADD space to the recording after the fact.

So yes it's far more important to treat the recording space first and get the sound of that space as neutral as possible, or as perfect as possible for the instruments you are recording, and neutral is simply easier.

Put it another way:
You could take a good recording into a perfect mix room elsewhere and mix, right?
But you can't take a compromised recording into a perfect mix room and make it work.
Therefore the recording space (if we assume the usual pre-requisites of musician, instrument, arrangement etc) is the defining factor.

Right. Yes I realize both room are important and need treatment, but in my case, I think the control room should be first. One reason is I think it may be the bigger issue. Second is as I do remote recordings, and of coursed that takes my room out of the equation, the control room treated first may yteild the best benefit.
Agreed?

Yes, agreed

I’ll post link to drum recording I did two days ago. No processing, eq. Just parallel compression

thoughts on this product??


https://www.acoustimac.com/roxul-rb6...kaAq-mEALw_wcB

That'll do it for broadband absorption, ie around the walls, but it seems to be commonly accepted that for the lower (sub 100Hz) freqs in the corner traps, you want the fluffy loft insulation type fibreglass going floor to ceiling.

Well, if you cant treat your room; get a laptop and do some adjustments in your car. Not the best option; but it may get you closer....

I don`t hear anyhting inherently bad on your recording room from the video you posted. The vocals could be louder in the mix, IMO, she`s good!
But on that drum excerpt you posted, I believe I do hear some room resonances (but it could be the drums tuning as well).

Room treatment is adamant, and live rooms are a bit more forgiving in that sense than control rooms. Live rooms just have to sound good, control rooms need to be precise! But dont use foam, use rockwool or glasswool panels and bass traps. Ethan Winer can be of a lot of help to you, check his stuff out!

Another thing that I find helps A LOT is speaker measurement and correction software, such as Sonarworks. It wont help you with reflections and the phase issues that arise from those, but it does wonders to your spectral balance.

Another good option is to buy a couple of cheap small speakers (like those we used to have for old desktop computers), each with different characteristics and use them to check your mixes while you do them. Since they wont be able to excite your room too much, you`ll get that out of the way, and they can help guide you towards good translation. (I have one thats really really ****ty, and if I can hear kick and bass well and nothing is distorting like hell on those I know im good to go. And another one thats really really boomy. And if my hi-lows and low-mids are not drowning everything else on those, I know Im ok too).

Another tool I've been using and liking a lot is iZotope's Tonal Balance Control. It gives you three different curves taken from thousands of masters in each genre and compares your output to those. Having that as the last insert on my 2bus helps me keep my ears in check, specially when mixing for long hours. If a chorus comes in and suddenly theres a huge bump in some region, I go look for that bump, and quite frequently I find something to shave off that I got used to, or that my monitoring isn't showing me well enough.

I used to have a lot of spectral balance issues, but since implementing correction, the ****ty speakers and tonal balance control, I have never again had to review a mix due to tonal issues (the problems I get now are due to my ears and my concepts, heheh). I get the tonality imprint of the source I'm listening my mix on, but it's still the same mix, you know?

Good luck my friend!

I think yes I tend to agree .
I’ve got some rock wool 60 coming. 24-2’x4’ pieces. I’ll start with that in my control room.
I’m thinking 4 pieces on each side along my console. Then in corners, double stack so it’s 4”.

The ones on the walls need to be 4" to be truly effective.

2" is fine for the first reflection points, which are above your head (especially important if you don't have high ceilings), and where the waves will first hit the walls.

There's a trick you can use to make sure those side-placed early reflection panels are in the right place, which is to sit at your control position and get someone with a mirror to walk along the side wall.
Where you see the monitor appear in the mirror, that's your first reflection point.