Speaker and Room Calibration

I recently discovered speaker calibration. I thought I was doing everything right by putting broad band sound absorption on my walls etc, but my mixes (and then later my masters) were still pretty messed up. Specifically despite nearly a year of work, they still ended up sounding cheap. I couldn't figure it out.


But recently, I bought a measurement microphone and used REW to take a "snapshot" of my room at the listening spot. I couldn't believe what I was seeing!

Here is the curve of my room without correction. It's wild!! there's a 12dB boost in the low end, then for some reason there's a 10db boost in the mids on ONE SIDE. And there's a -6dB cut at 2hz. The response is all over the place!

Then I purchased the Sonarwroks Reference 3 plugin, re-did the tests and used the resulting calibration curve to do a couple of remasters. Suddenly, I can *hear*. Performing a small focused boost at 200hz to give a snare some pop finally makes sense! The difference in just my use of an EQ on the 2-buss has exploded in accuracy. Not saying I'm all the way there, but the difference in what I can do now vs what I thought I could do without calibrating my monitors and headphones is astounding.

So here's what I think is happening.

#1 - My speakers alone are not truly flat and so are in absolute need of being tuned.
#2 - the sound absorption is stopping big reflections and is trapping a lot of bass. without the sound absorption, the room was positively unusable as a mixing or recording space, let alone for something as sensitive as mastering.
#3 - even with the sound absorption, there still isn't uniform sound in the room as it's not an anchonic chamber.

Therefore, a combination of sound absorption on the walls/ceiling and speaker calibration seems to have done the trick to give me decently flat monitoring (finally!). As a bonus, I found a calibration curve for my headphones, which has helped me greatly mixing and mastering when silence is mandatory.

I still follow the guidelines: check on speakers, level match, use the minimum effective dose of any chosen tool, and always keep learning!