Recording - November 2015 - 31

to get a good tone. All too often, these
booths are 4' x 4' x 8' (for building economy) and are lined with foam or blankets
to kill the room tone. The result is a tone
that is wildly inaccurate at bass frequencies-boxy and boomy or thin depending
on the frequency-and very dead at high
frequencies.
The fact is, big studios with goodsounding vocal booths have much more
space; often these booths are the size of
a bedroom or larger, equivalent to an
entire home studio. Certainly these
booths are not square, with the third
dimension harmonically related to the
other two (as is the case with a 4' x 4' x
8' booth). You can often get better results
tracking in a larger room, using
absorbers or portable mic-stand-mounted
microphone isolators (even blankets hung
over mic stands) in closer proximity to the
microphone, or by using absorbers at
nearby reflection points.
Again, little booths like this are sometimes necessary for isolation purposes.
You see them used quite often in the
voiceover community, where it's important that you not hear cars or other external voices in voice tracks. So you can
sometimes make them work for these reasons, but these should be seen as a last
resort and not a necessity for getting
good vocal tracks.

9. Speakers sound better with early
reflections than without
I come across this one a lot, though it's
more common in audiophile circles than it
is in professional audio and the recording
studio world. This one surprises me; I
would have thought the oft-discussed
Reflection-Free Zone (RFZ) concept had
taken root enough to eliminate this misconception, yet it persists. Did you notice
I'm trying to contain my snarky "mythbusting" language on this one?
In all seriousness, the only thing I can say
to someone who believes this is that they
haven't ever listened to music in a good
Reflection-Free Zone. There is room for all
sorts of preferences in the audio world - so
much comes down to a matter of taste, after
all, but the benefits of the RFZ are numerous.
When listening to speakers in an
untreated room, the first thing we hear is
the direct sound, coming in a straight line
from the speaker to our ears. A few milliseconds later, we start to hear early
reflections coming from the side walls
and ceiling. Unless you have a large
room, these reflections are early enough
in time (under 25-30 ms) that we don't
perceive them as distinct echoes, but
rather as the same sound coming from
more than one place.
As such, our localization cues, as part of
the psychoacoustics process, get confused.

We are not able to discern exactly where
the sound is coming from. So in a ReflectionFree Zone, we can get rid of these reflections (either by angling the walls & ceiling,
or by using good absorptive panels at the
reflection points), so that all we are left with
is the direct sound of the speakers.
The improvements of this strategy are
clear, as shown by Figure 5, a graph of
frequency response with and without a
Reflection-Free Zone in place.
These benefits are also clearly audible.
The coherence of the stereo image and
soundstage is greatly enhanced, almost
like listening through quality headphones,
but retaining the spaciousness and tone
that only speakers can provide. For the mix
engineer, this means things like panning,
adjusting reverb/delay tails, and subtle
midrange EQ tweaks to get tracks to sit
together better become much more audible. After an engineer adapts his ears to
working in a RFZ, mixes come together
more quickly, with less guesswork, so the
engineer's confidence can grow.
10. Listening rooms should be wider
than they are long
There are some well-known people
who espouse this rule. Despite my respect
for some of these folks, I am still going to
include this in the "myths" category
because it is easily shown to be mistaken.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - November 2015