ABSTRACT
A room’s sound needs to be complementary to the source being recorded, and to the aesthetic goals of the project. Unfortunately, the small square and rectangular rooms commonly found in home and project studios are not ideal for recording or mixing. A live room has reflective boundaries - the walls, floor, and ceiling are hard surfaces that reflect sound back into the room. Musicians and performers generally like bright reflective rooms because the reflections provide instant feedback about how they sound. An overly dead room, such as a voice-over booth, is a very unnatural environment and can be uncomfortable to those not familiar with that acoustic. A mixture of absorption and diffusion is typically applied to many medium and large rooms, absorbing excess reflections while randomly scattering a controlled amount back into the room. In some studio designs, certain walls are treated exclusively with diffusion and others with absorption.
