State-of-the-Art Digital

[kodomo]

So what, in your wise wisdom and education, is the desired target curve for a good acoustically treated room? Flat response?

Is not the room’s response system dependent?

Do tell us more about experiencing a “very good room”. What exactly constitutes a “very good room”?

I’m curious and look forward to your answers.

Somehow, I think that many here have lost sight of the goal, which is musical enjoyment and not instrumentation.

I know that I have personally have never needed a good acoustically treated room to enjoy Miles Davis, John Coltrane, the Doors, the Cure, the Smiths, Sonny Rollins or ..........on a high resolution system.

No need to be rude, I do not have "very wise wisdom", I was just stating facts based on measurements and listening so as to help people searching. As you asked for it, here is how I got interested and learned what I have learned. I have both education and practice/experience in a few fields about sound. I studied architecture and had formal acoustics education at school. Then, also as a part time musician, I started to go to recordings where I got more interested in production. I have spent some time at studios and then proceed to build one for my own. I always kept reading and trying to experiment and visit rooms and take measurements and slowly start to correlate what I measure with what I hear. I took ear training for production. Then I got interested in horn speakers and started building my own speakers as well as rooms. I was lucky to have listened to a variety of good speakers growing up as my father and his friends were also interested in music and hifi. I really got into high efficiency directivity controlled speaker design and small room acoustics, they have become a passion of sorts. After marriage I have closed my studio but I still keep my equipment for some time later, hopefully getting closer. As a side job, I consult people on their studio mixing and home listening rooms acoustics. I will share here in my post my own room and speakers frequency response along with my rooms decay response so you can have an idea. This is a non dedicated room, our houses living room and it has much better response than a lot of studios I have visited and almost all the listening rooms. Please not this is a 5db scale showing detailed response anomaly if existing. My bass can be adjusted so I can choose to listen closer to a harman preferred response. This here is a flat response. There is no eq, nothing, and it is passive crossovers with 5 way horn loaded system. If you are more interested check the monoandstereo article on my room and speakers. Unless you come and listen, these are the best clues you can have if my sound is balanced and my rooms addition is controlled and homogenous.
https://www.monoandstereo.com/2019/11/okan-soylu-horn-system.html

My whole goal is musical enjoyment and besides playing music I am an avid listener with no TV since 1997 and a I listen to at least a few hours of music everyday. I have thousands of LP's and thousands of CD's that I collected throughout the years and I keep on searching and listening and buying still. I listen to a variety of genres of music. So, I am not an equipment listener nor I want to listen to a room which is intended for replay of recordings. You can enjoy music with any system but that was not the question here. It actually is not a question at all, you enjoy whatever you like to enjoy, no one has a say in it. The question is if we can have a room that has as little harm to our recorded music.

For me what I expect from a room is simple. Good, homogenous decay, and getting harming effects of room modes as little as possible that result in dips and peaks. No room is neutral, they all have a sound even with treatments depending on its materials and proportions and size. However, the idea is to have lineer/controlled room response so as not to have unbalanced frequency response, stereo image and non linear decay throughout the band that would acoustically shadow upper frequencies details and tails. As a note, room placement of speakers and the listener is as much imortant as the treatments. One can not be enough, both has to be taken care of if we want fidelity to recording.

 

[kodomo]

I also make audio gatherings at my hotel enjoying music and investigating the relationship of recording to replay. I invite classical and jazz musicians/bands, record them while attendees are in the same room. Have different types of recordings and more than one engineer for mixing so as to show how everything effects what we hear. There are workshops for acoustics, sound, jazz history etc. We also have generous equipment to listen back thanks to friends who own hifishops.

 

[morricab]

Don't know the plaster, but it's a wooden house, like you find frequently in American towns, and the music room has lots of windows (these are now all covered, on the front wall with ASC window plugs, in the back with shutters).



If you had the years long, detailed and intensive experience as I have with improving my room acoustics, and with how treatments can change the sound in other people's rooms, you would not make that dismissive assertion. I suppose Acousticsguru has even more experience than I do; I'm just an eagerly learning amateur in this hobby, but one who at least tries to push biases aside and see things as they are.



But that's the weird part. A good amount of what I originally perceived to be artificial digital distortions in my system, especially 'digititis' in the highs, turned out to be room distortions (soundwave distortions by the room or by objects in the room, including gear). The digital is just fine (as also confirmed in a friend's room who has in principle the same digital setup).

Think about it. Why do concert venues usually sound so good? An important part of the equation is that because of their size and design they exhibit few of those nasty uncontrolled short-distance reflections. It's important to mitigate those in your music room as well, if you want anything somewhat resembling a concert experience.

I have heard systems in all manner of room quality but never mistook those reverberations and reflections for the effects heard from analog and digital electronics. They are just so different in their impact on the nature of what you hear.
Put a live musician in your bad room and the sound might be hard and unpleasant but it will still sound like a live musician playing in a crappy space. Record and playback that person in your room and you will be highly unlikely to be convinced of something remotely live and it will have nothing to do with the room.

 

[morricab]

I also make audio gatherings at my hotel enjoying music and investigating the relationship of recording to replay. I invite classical and jazz musicians/bands, record them while attendees are in the same room. Have different types of recordings and more than one engineer for mixing so as to show how everything effects what we hear. There are workshops for acoustics, sound, jazz history etc. We also have generous equipment to listen back thanks to friends who own hifishops.

What is the outcome of the live vs. recorded sessions? How well do the recordings + playback compare to what was heard live?

I did a fair amount of this when I had a profi violinist for a girlfriend. For example, We did it for her practice of upcoming concerts, where she was playing the 24 Paganini Caprices. For solo violin the Acoustats I had at the time could reproduce this instrument quite convincingly...of course having very good tube gear behind helped...

 

[kodomo]

This is the system and the room I curently am in

 

[kodomo]

What is the outcome of the live vs. recorded sessions? How well do the recordings + playback compare to what was heard live?

I did a fair amount of this when I had a profi violinist for a girlfriend. For example, We did it for her practice of upcoming concerts, where she was playing the 24 Paganini Caprices. For solo violin the Acoustats I had at the time could reproduce this instrument quite convincingly...of course having very good tube gear behind helped...

A replayed event is never the same with the live event. We listened in the same room with musicians. In different rooms and with different equipments, different mixing choices etc.

The preconceptions of listeners on natural recording does not necessarily translate to simplicity in reality. Depending on the microphone type and placement, recording rooms effect varies from little importance to everything. Choices of preamps and the use of effects (from reverbs to compressors) and panning, in short what we hear is what the recording/mixing engineer has intended to. He reconstructs a reality, he can choose to mirror the live event or may choose otherwise. Which one would be more believable is depending on his quality as an engineer. A simple recording chain does not need to necessarily create the live event illusion better than complicated recording chain. These were some of the outcomes of our sessions.

 

[Al M.]

I have heard systems in all manner of room quality but never mistook those reverberations and reflections for the effects heard from analog and digital electronics. They are just so different in their impact on the nature of what you hear.

Some artifacts from digital reproduction and amplification are easily recognizable as such indeed (for example, treble that stands our as a separate, disconnected entity, or a synthetic, 'plasticky' sound). Yet room reflections can mimic some other of such artifacts, especially when it comes to harshness and hardness of sound.

Mike in #817 reported an experience similar to mine, and we are not the only ones with such experiences. It seems we'll simply have to agree to disagree on this topic.

 

[acousticsguru]

But that's the weird part. A good amount of what I originally perceived to be artificial digital distortions in my system, especially 'digititis' in the highs, turned out to be room distortions (soundwave distortions by the room or by objects in the room, including gear). The digital is just fine (as also confirmed in a friend's room who has in principle the same digital setup).

Agree 100%, and I'll gladly admit you managed to express in few words what I apparently wasn't able to in a rambling rant. Needless to say, room treatment will address, among other, the frequency range that's getting on our nerves most quickly, so before one accuses a system or DAC of "digititis", one will need to make sure this same frequency range isn't amplified beyond proportion in this room, and more importantly, that it doesn't hang on. That's why I brought up room acoustics in this thread, wondering how much of the "digititis" people claim to hear from SOTA DACs is really comb filtering:

https://www.acousticfields.com/comb-filtering-relate-room-acoustics/

I'm by no means an expert on room acoustics (Brad/morricab once mentioned this, and I believe I did repeatedly, that moniker of mine stuck after former customers of mine bestowed it on me, I'm just one of those eternally curious people, by no means an expert on anything whatsoever), but building loudspeakers, I eventually had to get my own FFT analyzer at one point, which in turn taught me an awful lot about how rooms not only affect measurements, but logically, anything we hear in any given place. Using an FFT analyzer is sobering to say the least. There are so many issues where there are boundaries, it's frustrating. It proves the credo "Don't believe everything you think" is directly applicable to audio.

What I'm at least somewhat of an expert of are my health issues. One of them are migraines. Is "digititis" a migraine trigger? YES! Is comb filtering a migraine trigger? Yes! Are they the same thing? No. Do they sound alike? I'll say there's enough similarity that one could be mistaken for the other very, very easily, so much so I wrote my lengthy rant above. Is it possible one may amplify the other? I don't know, but wouldn't bet against it. With the specific frequency range overloading a room with distortion, who's going to say which (distortion) is which?

In short: don't ever accuse a DAC of "digititis" until, for example, you've spent several hours listening to it using electrostatic headphones if one can't be sure the room isn't the culprit. Brad/morricab will be pleased to hear I'm using a tube amp for those. I won't say I'd ever base my buying decision listening to a source component on headphones only (not really a fan of headphones), but it's worth a try. If that "digititis" is gone, you'll have a quick answer to at least one question.

Can room acoustics be overestimated? How could they? Ever heard an audiophile system out of doors, or in an anechoic chamber? I have, both. Proved one thing to me: the contribution of the system to the overall sound is what tends to be overestimated.

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

 

[microstrip]

But that's the weird part. A good amount of what I originally perceived to be artificial digital distortions in my system, especially 'digititis' in the highs, turned out to be room distortions (soundwave distortions by the room or by objects in the room, including gear). The digital is just fine (as also confirmed in a friend's room who has in principle the same digital setup).

Digital distortions are gone since long. However, as you say, the extended bandwidth of digital can show problems in a room that are not perceived with many analog systems.

Think about it. Why do concert venues usually sound so good? An important part of the equation is that because of their size and design they exhibit few of those nasty uncontrolled short-distance reflections. It's important to mitigate those in your music room as well, if you want anything somewhat resembling a concert experience.

Real sound field and stereo sound field are very different. In stereo you need controlled reflections to create the illusion of a soundstage and the resemblance in stereo is mostly created by cues, not by reflections.

 

[acousticsguru]

By the way, if anyone asked me what a well-treated room sounds like, I'd really want to say "alive", but probably give a fishy reply such as "it's a compromise" when the real answer should be "not like a room". The problem is there's already room information on most recordings. That's the room you want to get transported to. Not overlay the characteristics of the recording venue with issues of one's listening room. But I'll say this: when I think of acoustic treatment, I do NOT mean overly dampened. It's a personal choice, but I'd rather have a room that errs on the side of liveliness than dullness. It's just my experience that this is also the most common excuse audiophiles use who won't treat their room (for a number of reasons, WAF being one of them, HiFi dealers who merely want to sell them more expensive equipment on a never-ending quest to "solve the problem" another) because they believe theirs is just a bit lively, perhaps average or better. In reality, the average living room is strictly awful, especially in modern buildings. Once you've treated it properly, you'll want those years back you spent in there listening to your system, your money back for equipment and in particular gadgets you'd not have needed etc. Last but not least, you'll sit there enjoying the playback wondering what happened to the "digititis" of your SOTA DAC.

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

 

[microstrip]

(...)
Electronics and digital signals, produce distortions that are wholly out of nature and it therefore Only requires very small amounts to cause irreparable damage to the signal. This of course assumes the recording itself is not too damaged from these effects...then not much will save it.
(...)

You often repeat this argument, that IMHO is an argument of the past. Can you nominate in technical terms what are these distortions and where they currently exist?

 

[Carlos269]

No need to be rude, I do not have "very wise wisdom", I was just stating facts based on measurements and listening so as to help people searching. As you asked for it, here is how I got interested and learned what I have learned. I have both education and practice/experience in a few fields about sound. I studied architecture and had formal acoustics education at school. Then, also as a part time musician, I started to go to recordings where I got more interested in production. I have spent some time at studios and then proceed to build one for my own. I always kept reading and trying to experiment and visit rooms and take measurements and slowly start to correlate what I measure with what I hear. I took ear training for production. Then I got interested in horn speakers and started building my own speakers as well as rooms. I was lucky to have listened to a variety of good speakers growing up as my father and his friends were also interested in music and hifi. I really got into high efficiency directivity controlled speaker design and small room acoustics, they have become a passion of sorts. After marriage I have closed my studio but I still keep my equipment for some time later, hopefully getting closer. As a side job, I consult people on their studio mixing and home listening rooms acoustics. I will share here in my post my own room and speakers frequency response along with my rooms decay response so you can have an idea. This is a non dedicated room, our houses living room and it has much better response than a lot of studios I have visited and almost all the listening rooms. Please not this is a 5db scale showing detailed response anomaly if existing. My bass can be adjusted so I can choose to listen closer to a harman preferred response. This here is a flat response. There is no eq, nothing, and it is passive crossovers with 5 way horn loaded system. If you are more interested check the monoandstereo article on my room and speakers. Unless you come and listen, these are the best clues you can have if my sound is balanced and my rooms addition is controlled and homogenous.
https://www.monoandstereo.com/2019/11/okan-soylu-horn-system.html

My whole goal is musical enjoyment and besides playing music I am an avid listener with no TV since 1997 and a I listen to at least a few hours of music everyday. I have thousands of LP's and thousands of CD's that I collected throughout the years and I keep on searching and listening and buying still. I listen to a variety of genres of music. So, I am not an equipment listener nor I want to listen to a room which is intended for replay of recordings. You can enjoy music with any system but that was not the question here. It actually is not a question at all, you enjoy whatever you like to enjoy, no one has a say in it. The question is if we can have a room that has as little harm to our recorded music.

For me what I expect from a room is simple. Good, homogenous decay, a of getting harming effects of room modes as little as possible that result in dips and peaks. No room is neutral, they all have a sound even with treatments depending on its materials and proportions. However, the idea is to have lineer/controlled room response so as not to have unbalanced frequency response, stereo image and non linear decay throughout the band that would acoustically shadow upper frequencies details and tails. As a note, room placement of speakers and the listener is as much imortant as the treatments. One can not be enough, both has to be taken care of if we want fidelity to recording.

Thanks for the detailed response. The nodal attributes of any room are simply the physics of the dimensions and geometry of the room. It is trivial to measure the distances to back calculate to wavelengths to frequencies. But what is not so trivial is to design or treat a room that will respond the same to different transducers, types and designs. Take for instance, vertical linear arrays which have minimum interactions with the floor and ceiling. The polar radiation patterns dictate how a particular speakers or drivers will interact with the room. Decay times and reflections are a function of surface materials and curvature characteristics.

Without getting carried away here, my point is that unless your desired target curve is a flat response then it all becomes subjective and most of us are not after a flat frequency response, mainly due to the Fletcher Munson response of human hearing.

I will try to avoid the back and forth and will simply state that although the room definitely imparts it’s acoustic signature on sound, mainly below 200Hz, it is the subject of way too many variables, including the speed of sound’s temperature coefficient, to be of great concern unless you are making instrumented reference measurements for design, academia or scientific endeavors.

 

[acousticsguru]

I will try to avoid the back and forth and will simply state that although the room definitely imparts it’s acoustic signature on sound, mainly below 200Hz, it is the subject of way too many variables, including the speed of sound’s temperature coefficient, to be of great concern unless you are making instrumented reference measurements for design, academia or scientific endeavors.

Allow me to chime in here: while I agree that many if not most rooms need low frequency treatment, I don't think this is going to affect people's choice of or prejudice against one or the other SOTA DAC much. That's mostly a problem of the room, and/or its interaction with the speakers. At least that's my impression: when people start making blank statements about one digital audio brand versus another or one model of DAC versus another, my concern is (some of) the differences they hear have little or nothing to do with the brand or component. Worse yet: they'll build whole systems around their room issues, i.e. compensating for flaws rather than trying to address them.

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

 

[acousticsguru]

Without getting carried away here, my point is that unless your desired target curve is a flat response then it all becomes subjective and most of us are not after a flat frequency response, mainly due to the Fletcher Munson response of human hearing.

No disagreement, but unless one were building a recording or mixing studio, the sound one tries to achieve is indeed subjective, is it not? And I don't mean in the sense that one won't try to even out the response. It need not primarily be flat but tail off without delay and evenly so, and also, not look like a comb (FFT analyzers include functions that could make any such frequency plot look reasonable, but those are the exact issues that one wants to address). Getting the frequency response inverted to virtually match a Fletcher-Munson curve isn't merely impractical (I doubt it's technically feasible without deadening the room, after all, not even an anechoic chamber achieves anything close), I'm sure it would sound horrible.

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

 

[microstrip]

Thanks for the detailed response. The nodal attributes of any room are simply the physics of the dimensions and geometry of the room. It is trivial to measure the distances to back calculate to wavelengths to frequencies. But what is not so trivial is to design or treat a room that will respond the same to different transducers, types and designs. Take for instance, vertical linear arrays which have minimum interactions with the floor and ceiling. The polar radiation patterns dictate how a particular speakers or drivers will interact with the room. Decay times and reflections are a function of surface materials and curvature characteristics. (...)

IMHO as important as dimensions are the room materials - going from a drywall structure to a stone or concrete wall can completely change the behavior of a room in the bass. Unexpected nulls due to phase cancellation can make a room sound subjectively sterile. A simulation program, such as CARA (Computer Aided Room Acoustics) allows us to see the effects of materials in room design.

 

[morricab]

Agree 100%, and I'll gladly admit you managed to express in few words what I apparently wasn't able to in a rambling rant. Needless to say, room treatment will address, among other, the frequency range that's getting on our nerves most quickly, so before one accuses a system or DAC of "digititis", one will need to make sure this same frequency range isn't amplified beyond proportion in this room, and more importantly, that it doesn't hang on. That's why I brought up room acoustics in this thread, wondering how much of the "digititis" people claim to hear from SOTA DACs is really comb filtering:

https://www.acousticfields.com/comb-filtering-relate-room-acoustics/

I'm by no means an expert on room acoustics (Brad/morricab once mentioned this, and I believe I did repeatedly, that moniker of mine stuck after former customers of mine bestowed it on me, I'm just one of those eternally curious people, by no means an expert on anything whatsoever), but building loudspeakers, I eventually had to get my own FFT analyzer at one point, which in turn taught me an awful lot about how rooms not only affect measurements, but logically, anything we hear in any given place. Using an FFT analyzer is sobering to say the least. There are so many issues where there are boundaries, it's frustrating. It proves the credo "Don't believe everything you think" is directly applicable to audio.

What I'm at least somewhat of an expert of are my health issues. One of them are migraines. Is "digititis" a migraine trigger? YES! Is comb filtering a migraine trigger? Yes! Are they the same thing? No. Do they sound alike? I'll say there's enough similarity that one could be mistaken for the other very, very easily, so much so I wrote my lengthy rant above. Is it possible one may amplify the other? I don't know, but wouldn't bet against it. With the specific frequency range overloading a room with distortion, who's going to say which (distortion) is which?

In short: don't ever accuse a DAC of "digititis" until, for example, you've spent several hours listening to it using electrostatic headphones if one can't be sure the room isn't the culprit. Brad/morricab will be pleased to hear I'm using a tube amp for those. I won't say I'd ever base my buying decision listening to a source component on headphones only (not really a fan of headphones), but it's worth a try. If that "digititis" is gone, you'll have a quick answer to at least one question.

Can room acoustics be overestimated? How could they? Ever heard an audiophile system out of doors, or in an anechoic chamber? I have, both. Proved one thing to me: the contribution of the system to the overall sound is what tends to be overestimated.

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

Even simpler, try a DAC that never caused you to think of digititis before and if it does in that system then maybe it isn’t the digital. If the perception of digititis goes away then it was probably the digital...

I am by no means saying a well balanced speaker and/or addressing room issues aren’t important, I just don’t think they are nearly as detrimental to playback as you are prescribing with regards to believability of the sonic quality.

 

[Mikem53]

By the way, if anyone asked me what a well-treated room sounds like, I'd really want to say "alive", but probably give a fishy reply such as "it's a compromise" when the real answer should be "not like a room". The problem is there's already room information on most recordings. That's the room you want to get transported to. Not overlay the characteristics of the recording venue with issues of one's listening room. But I'll say this: when I think of acoustic treatment, I do NOT mean overly dampened. It's a personal choice, but I'd rather have a room that errs on the side of liveliness than dullness. It's just my experience that this is also the most common excuse audiophiles use who won't treat their room (for a number of reasons, WAF being one of them, HiFi dealers who merely want to sell them more expensive equipment on a never-ending quest to "solve the problem" another) because they believe theirs is just a bit lively, perhaps average or better. In reality, the average living room is strictly awful, especially in modern buildings. Once you've treated it properly, you'll want those years back you spent in there listening to your system, your money back for equipment and in particular gadgets you'd not have needed etc. Last but not least, you'll sit there enjoying the playback wondering what happened to the "digititis" of your SOTA DAC.

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

One of the audio club members is a “claimed” semi pro recording artist. I was over his house some years ago, his basement was an “anechoic chamber”, according to him. As you descended down the stairs, you could hear the room go dead, it was kind of eire like, like a bomb shelter in the ground. His music system , monitors, etc.. sounded flat and lifeless, like the sound out of the speakers went 6 feet and stopped.. Not my idea of a perfect room..
Another fellow had all Michael Green‘s philosophy and products of what music should sound like , installed in his house. This was comprised of solid wood panels of different shapes, which could be loosened or tightened to affect the sound, all over his room. All the playback equipment had to be sandwiched between shelves and lightweight, all lightweight components of consumer grade quality. He had Michael Green flown out and spend the day to get it setup. You never heard such a slapstick comedy of music like this room delivered.. There was no pinpointed sound.. everything was everywhere several times over.. This was about 15+ years ago and I still tease him about it.. He never got back into music after that..
Just two extremes that I have experienced.. I’ll deal with an imperfect room as best I can without stuffing it up. Some uncontrolled liveliness is not such a bad thing.. It’s a compromise for me, I try and address the major flaws and find ways to make the best of what I have.
In the meantime, I enjoy reading and hearing about other people’s systems and solutions they come up with to enjoy the music.. still learning and tweaking ... enjoying the conversation..

 

[microstrip]

(...) A simple recording chain does not need to necessarily create the live event illusion better than complicated recording chain. These were some of the outcomes of our sessions.

Yes, many people assume the simple recording chains are more realistic because they are usually used to make simple recordings, that are not exigent at all. But as soon as we start listening to complex recordings of real music in systems that can reproduce it all we see the capabilities of the extra complication when adequately used.

 

[acousticsguru]

Even simpler, try a DAC that never caused you to think of digititis before and if it does in that system then maybe it isn’t the digital. If the perception of digititis goes away then it was probably the digital...

Not following?! If one can make the digititis disappear by any manipulation other than replacing the DAC, then logically the DAC is not the cause. A simple process of elimination would seem to preclude such a possibility. Sincerely confused by your statement, but then, I may have had a window seat in science classes.

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

 

[acousticsguru]

One of the audio club members is a “claimed” semi pro recording artist. I was over his house some years ago, his basement was an “anechoic chamber”, according to him. As you descended down the stairs, you could hear the room go dead, it was kind of eire like, like a bomb shelter in the ground. His music system , monitors, etc.. sounded flat and lifeless, like the sound out of the speakers went 6 feet and stopped.. Not my idea of a perfect room..
Another fellow had all Michael Green‘s philosophy and products of what music should sound like , installed in his house. This was comprised of solid wood panels of different shapes, which could be loosened or tightened to affect the sound, all over his room. All the playback equipment had to be sandwiched between shelves and lightweight, all lightweight components of consumer grade quality. He had Michael Green flown out and spend the day to get it setup. You never heard such a slapstick comedy of music like this room delivered.. There was no pinpointed sound.. everything was everywhere several times over.. This was about 15+ years ago and I still tease him about it.. He never got back into music after that..
Just two extremes that I have experienced.. I’ll deal with an imperfect room as best I can without stuffing it up. Some uncontrolled liveliness is not such a bad thing.. It’s a compromise for me, I try and address the major flaws and find ways to make the best of what I have.
In the meantime, I enjoy reading and hearing about other people’s systems and solutions they come up with to enjoy the music.. still learning and tweaking ... enjoying the conversation..

That's sad. The requirements of a recording studio are virtually opposite of a two-channel listening room or even home theatre. Some of my musician friends and acquaintances are confronted with this. Best to treat the room for listening and use gobos/a portable (vocal/guitar/violin whatnot) booth for recording. Of course they'll then still have a problem if they're doing their own mixing…

Greetings from Switzerland, David.