Preferences of Critical Listening Environments Among Sound Engineers

The Measurement and Calibration of Sound Reproducing Systems

“…Some argue that it makes the job simpler. A recent paper provided evidence that acoustically dead monitoring environments may be preferred while mixing, but for mastering a more reflective space is preferred [12]. This agrees with other findings indicating that for recreational listening (which mastering should attempt to emulate) some room reflections are desirable, e.g., [1,2,13,14].…”

“…References [1,2,[12][13][14] focus on several of the perceptual consequences of reflections. It turns out that in most small-to-mediumsized sound-reproduction spaces human listeners find these multi-directional reflected sounds to be mostly benign, even beneficial if the loudspeaker has relatively constant directivity.…”

“…A common perception is spaciousness-information about the listening space, not timbre-damaging comb filtering. This is certainly true for recreational listening, but professionals may find that a less reflective space is preferred for mixing but perhaps not for mastering recordings [12]. These measurements are therefore misleading, and even if equalization were capable of removing such reflections, there is the decision of whether it is necessary.…”

Optimization of Virtual Loudspeakers for Spatial Room Acoustics Reproduction with Headphones

“…Based on the time difference of arrivals between microphone pairs in short time windows, it estimates the direction of arrival (DOA) for each audio sample in the captured RIR. Therefore, the SDM allows a wide range of perceptual room acoustics studies, and it has been recently applied to study concert halls [7,8], studio control rooms [9], car cabins [10,11], as well as stage acoustics for musicians [12].…”

“…Earlier studies employing SDM [7][8][9][10][11][12] have utilized a more straightforward synthesis method, namely Nearest Loudspeaker Synthesis (NLS), partially to circumvent the potential spectral issues with VBAP. NLS distributes each audio sample of a single monaural RIR to the nearest reproduction loudspeaker based on the estimated DOA information.…”