One of the often more surprising things about treating your room is this:

You go through all that effort of planning, building, moving, bleeding, sweating, crying and pushing on to find that at a first listen it sounds absolutely fantastic!

But the first mix still turns out like garbage.

And the second mix does as well.

Wasn’t the room supposed to translate properly now?

Did you do something wrong?

On a closer listen all your reference music still sounds great. But when you really pay attention certain weird things do pop out.

Maybe panning and width isn’t like you expected.

Or just the balance and placement of elements is quite different than how you used to hear it.

Like the placement of the vocal, or the smack of a snare drum.

You’re confused. What’s going on?

Well let me start by saying that this is actually completely normal!

Especially if the room sounded particularly bad previously, you likely conditioned your hearing to adapt in some very particular ways.

And it can take time to re-condition your hearing to the new setup.