Recording - March 2016 - 22

Years ago, in my recording days, it was universally acknowledged that what we heard in a control room was, to one degree or another, not accurate to what was actually on the track. We
knew it could be the speakers, the room, the amplifiers, and who knows what else, but we didn't
know where to go with that. A simple case of guessing in a data-less world.
So we went to all sorts of lengths in the quest for accuracy. We'd redesign the speakers, redesign
the rooms, redesign the electronics, even redesign the furniture. We'd redesign pretty much
everything in the hopes that in our guesswork we'd stumble upon the Holy Grail. One fellow even told me his ceiling was "acoustically transparent", but never elaborated on
just what that meant, or what advantage it gave him. But he sure was proud of it!
We'd listen on Auratones and NS-10s, we'd play a cassette of a mix in
our car (one of my least-favorite references, despite Brian Marshak's interesting take on the subject in this month's Fade Out), we'd cup our
hands behind our ears. Someone even made a product that you
wore to do the cupping for you. They looked like cat ears to me.
Cute, but they seemed like a "good college try"-an interesting
concept, but their value was not obvious to me.
The problem
So there we were, stuck in a topsy-turvy world that was
more like an Alice In Wonderland adventure, or a
Firesign Theater routine... "Everything You Know Is
Wrong." Then came Dr. Floyd Toole, head of acoustical research at JBL/Harman (now retired). In his great
book, Sound Reproduction, he gave us the "Circle of
Confusion":

By Bruce Black

~ We evaluate microphones
~ Using monitors
~ That were evaluated with recordings used as test signals
~ Which were created using microphones
~ That were evaluated using monitors
~ That were evaluated with recordings used as test signals...
and so on, endlessly around the circle. Dr. Toole's illustration was primarily for speakers, but it applies to rooms
as well. We evaluated a room's acoustic signature using pretty much the same method, using something that was familiar
but very far from being a reference standard. We just went
around and around the circle, making evaluations that were not
repeatable and used references of questionable validity (even if they
sounded good).
Many commercial studios were built to look good, at a time when aural
neutrality wasn't even on the radar of studio designers (some would say it still
isn't). Room design was pretty hit and miss-throw stuff up on the walls and see
what happens. So you'd end up with a few rooms that sounded fair to excellent, and
a lot of rooms that sounded like crap, with poor imaging, unrepentant resonances, dull
highs, boomy lows, and no sense of space. But since a lot of money had been spent on them,
they de facto "sounded good". Because the investment dictated they had to, or heads could roll.
All this indicated we had a substantial lack of usable data, and no easy or apparent way to
collect it-a sort of "data resolution" problem. Some of you will notice that in much of my writing
I frequently speak of collecting and using data. This is because the judgments above give us
nothing to act on. But data like "+9 dB at 75 Hz" provides a useable specific target and implies
a course of action.
You can't really fix problems when your judgments only go so far as "It Stinks", "Not Too Great",
"Eh, So-So", "Sounds Okay", and "Sounds Fantastic". It's certainly a dilemma... and we haven't even
spoken of the effects of listener moods, state of health (like a head cold), and other things like that.
So when your head stops spinning from this Alice In Wonderland mind game, overflowing with
will 'o the wisp variables, a lack of professional standards, and an internet filled with unvetted, questionable information, we're left with one thought-"HELP!" We need a plan of action, a sort of audio
22

RECORDING March 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - March 2016