Maybe you've heard that you should aim for an RT60 of about 0.3 seconds in your home studio.

So you measure your room with Room EQ Wizard, check the RT60 tab, see it dropping to 0.15 seconds in parts of the spectrum, and start wondering if you should actually remove panels.

Here's the truth: RT60 in small studios doesn't mean what you think it does. And if you start chasing those numbers, you'll only end up turning in circles.

The $10,000 Myth That's Destroying Your Studio

Here's what nobody tells you about RT60 in small rooms: It's complete nonsense.

I'm not being provocative here. This is straight from the acoustic textbooks that most "experts" conveniently ignore.

Floyd Toole puts it bluntly in Sound Reproduction - Loudspeakers and Rooms: "These are not Sabine spaces, and it is not appropriate to employ calculations and measurements that rely on assumptions of diffusivity."

Translation? The math behind RT60 literally doesn't work in your bedroom studio.

Why RT60 Falls Apart in Small Rooms

RT60 assumes you have a perfectly diffuse sound field - sound bouncing randomly in all directions with equal energy everywhere. But in your 12x14 bedroom studio? You've got standing waves dominating the low end. Direct (specular) reflections ruling the mids and highs. And once you put absorption in the room, you definitely killed any chance of true diffusion.

What you're actually measuring is the decay rate at your exact microphone position. Move the mic three feet? Different number. Different day? Different humidity? Different number again.

From Acoustic Absorbers and Diffusers by Cox and D'Antonio: "Sabine's formulation does not correctly predict the reverberation time for highly absorptive rooms... there is a lower frequency bound on the applicability of statistical absorption formulations."

They go on: "It does not prevent many practitioners, standards, and researchers still defining and using absorption coefficients below the Schroeder frequency, as it is convenient, even if physically incorrect."

Convenient, but wrong.

The Real Reason Studios Sound Bad (It's Not Your RT60)

After treating hundreds of rooms and analyzing thousands of measurements, here's what actually matters:

Balance, not numbers.

You could have an RT60 of 0.3 seconds and still have a room that sounds like garbage. How? Because if your low end is ringing at 1.5 seconds while your highs are dead at 0.1 seconds, you've created an acoustic nightmare.

I see this regularly. Someone treats their room with thin 5 inch “bass traps” (because the internet said so), kills all the high frequencies, leaves the bass untouched, and wonders why everything sounds muddy and lifeless.

The room isn't over-damped. It's imbalanced.

What You Should Actually Focus On

Forget chasing arbitrary RT60 targets. Here's what matters instead:

1. Balanced Decay Across the Spectrum You want consistent decay times from low to high frequencies. Not some magic number - just balance.
2. Minimized Room Impact The goal is to hear your speakers, not your room. The more controlled and even your treatment, the less your room colors the sound.
3. Dry, Not Dead "Dry" means good control with low decay rates across the spectrum. "Dead" means you've killed the highs while the bass still booms - an imbalanced mess that feels oppressive.

Even if you're using an omnidirectional sound source (which Floyd Toole correctly notes is required for true RT60 measurement), in a small room with room modes below the Schroeder frequency, the entire theory breaks down anyway.

The Simple Truth About Studio Acoustics

Your goal isn't to hit some magic number blessed by internet forums.

Your goal is to minimize your room's impact on the direct sound from your speakers. Period.

The lower and more balanced your decay times, the less your room colors what you hear. The less it colors what you hear, the more your mixes translate everywhere else.

Don't pull panels out of your room just because you've read somewhere that below 0.2 seconds means you've "overdamped" your room.

In small rooms, RT60 is a myth. What you really want is balance, not some number on a screen.

 If you're tired of chasing meaningless numbers and want to understand what your room actually needs, check out my Build A Better Bass Trap course. I show you exactly how to achieve balanced treatment that addresses the real problems - not the made-up ones. 

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