Many of us, probably most of us, mix in small spaces. We talk about typical domestic sized rooms as opposed the the larger spaces found in pro studios which tend to be better suited to reproducing sound accurately but actually for many of us who are working in our homes we are often working in the smaller rooms in our houses. It’s not uncommon for us to be working in spaces not just smaller than we’d like from an acoustic point of view, but rooms which are so small they limit our choice and placement of equipment. In this article we look at practical solutions to deal with the rooms so many of us actually work in.

As someone who recently moved from a moderate sized bedroom in my previous house to a fairly large converted garage space in my new house I was immediately reminded how much easier things become when the room gives the sound some space in which to propagate. However it’s still very much a work in progress and far from the space I’d choose if unrestrained by budget and practicalities.

It’s easy to suggest structural work and extensive acoustic treatment but if someone has limited resources and particularly if someone is working from a rented home there is a definite set of actions which are not available. What can we do to improve mixes in these circumstances?

Use Speaker Calibration Software

Let’s get this one out of the way first. What started as a high end, hardware-based option using products like the Trinnov has proliferated into solutions which can be accessed using free room measurement tools Like Room EQ Wizard and built in DSP available in many monitors, or software-only solutions like Sonarworks Sound ID Reference or ARC from IK Multimedia. There are options to suit every situation and budget, and they are extremely useful. However they are not a “free pass”, a magic bullet which lets you install something and not have to think about acoustics any more. They are a useful way to take what you have and make it better. If what you have is bad it will be less bad, if it is good it will be even better - Use it but don’t rely on it.

Use A Mastering Engineer

The logic behind using a mastering engineer applies to everyone, not only to professionals. A mastering engineer is a quality check and an opportunity to get an experienced listener to calibrate what the mixer has done. By the time a project is finished the mixer is often too familiar with the material to have a truly objective opinion on the material, but equally importantly it’s an opportunity for the material to be listened to in a better sounding space on more accurate monitoring.

If the project is important then we would always recommend using a mastering engineer, but if for whatever reason you wouldn’t send a track for mastering it is still possible to get some of the benefits if you have access to an alternative room. I used to have free access to a well designed mix room with quality monitoring as part of my job. I could do 90% of the work in my inferior room. Students frequently use their college studios for mix checking. Is there anywhere you could use? 

Mix At Low Volume

This is an important one. There are lots of things which start to happen when you monitor more loudly and some of them are bad. If you don’t know what Fletcher-Munson curves are then look them up! The human hearing system’s sensitivity changes with frequency and this sensitivity changes with loudness. There are recommendations for calibrated monitoring levels which are very useful but they do assume a good room.

If your room is acoustically unfavourable then the more energy you put into it the more of an issue this is likely to become but every bit as significant is the lack of headroom available in smaller, more inexpensive monitors. It’s hard to find a pair of nearfileld monitors which don’t “go loud” but to accurately judge transients you need significant headroom. As an example, Dolby recommend each monitor in an Atmos system be capable of delivering 85dB SPL at the monitoring position. Looking at max SPL  specs for typical monitors you’ll see they all exceed this figure but even if you happened to be listening from a meter away (the standard measurement distance), if you read further you’ll find that there is also a requirement that the monitor can deliver 85dB with 20dB of headroom, with 26dB being recommended. That pushes the requirement for each monitor to 111dB, and typically from rather further away than 1 meter. Taking a more conservative approach for smaller rooms and nearfield applications the Dolby specs would still require 99dB inclusive of headroom (79dB+20dB) at the listening position.

So if your monitors are a little on the budget side and your room less than ideal there are lots of reasons why giving your ears and your monitors the headroom they need to work at their best is a good idea.

Stand Outside

The oldest tricks are often the best ones and the ritual of going and standing just outside the door of the room you’re mixing in is both free and extremely effective. By taking yourself outside of the space you are no longer hearing direct sound, the detail becomes secondary to the relative levels of the different elements of the mix and it’s an instant new perspective allowing a tiring mixer to see past whatever was distracting them and to focus on the balance, which after all is the most important thing when mixing. It’s effective, it’s free. Why wouldn’t you do it?

Mix On Headphones You Can Trust

We’ve all heard this advice, cut out the bad acoustics by mixing on headphones. The only thing is that mixing exclusively on headphones is just… not great. There are mix room virtualisation software products which some people seem to think work. I’ve not yet experienced anything which has changed my mind about these but I have heard reports of a virtual mix stage solution Sony are using internally to run mix sessions which are impressing professionals so maybe these tools do work, I haven’t tried many but a simpler way to get away from the rather claustrophobic feeling of mixing on headphones is to choose the right headphones.

All headphones claim to be accurate, however closed back headphones “feel” coloured to me, by virtue of putting the ear inside a closed container. I have really nice Neumann headphones but I still can’t mix on them for long. If you see using headphones as a significant part of your work then at least try a pair of open backed headphones. They tend to have better frequency response, and have an inherent openness which feels cleaner and less fatiguing.

Use Small Speakers and Don’t Worry About The Bass

While a perfect set of monitors in an ideal room would be all we would need to get work done, it’s not like that for most of us. Something which is undeniable is that the extreme bottom end is the difficult bit to reproduce over a monitoring system. However most of the really important decisions exist in the midrange, which is the easiest part to reproduce. So why not concentrate on that and reference and check the bottom end using other means when the majority of the work is done? People have been mixing this way for years, running mixes on NS10s and Auratones and checking the big picture on the main monitors. While it’s not quite the same, the same working method can be adopted using headphones, your friend across town with the nice room and great monitors or even…a mastering engineer?

What Should I Do To Improve My Mixes In A Small Room?

It of course depends on who you are and what budget you have. Assuming you have done what you can for the acoustics (and for some people, particularly renters, that probably won’t be much) of the many options available I would recommend someone who can afford them buy a pair of Genelec 8331 ‘The Ones’ and run room measurements and correction using the excellent GLM software. There are other solutions out there which will achieve the same thing but that’s the one I’ve tried and they are small enough to accommodate the smallest of rooms, they are easy to use without space-consuming stands courtesy of the supplied isopods and they sound great.

If you have a restricted budget, don’t prioritise bass performance in your monitors, get everything right from 80Hz up using whatever monitors you have. Follow the advice above and use a combination of good quality (consider open-backed) headphones and a visit to any better monitoring you can access to check and adjust the low end. Although the choices available for entry level monitors is huge, the ADAM T5V is a popular choice and if you are really pushed for space the IK Multimedia iLoud MTM is an obvious choice. With a tiny footprint and built in DSP speaker correction it offers a similar approach to the Genelecs but at a far more accessible price.

Working in even the smallest spaces is possible, the important thing is to recognise what your space can, and more importantly can’t be expected to deliver and to work with what you have.

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