A few years back, I was working with this producer who set up a pretty decent home studio. 

Good gear, perfect listener and speaker placement, solid room treatment – the works. 

But his mixes? They still didn’t sound right outside the studio. 

We went through his setup...

As promised last week, here’s part 2 of my interview with JOHN DARKO to get his take on high end speakers (think hypercars in the speaker world) and room acoustics.

If you didn’t catch part 1 last week, click here. 

And thanks again to everyone who submitted a question!

No-one I...

It’s finally here!!

My interview with JOHN DARKO, where he answers all the questions that YOU submitted on speakers, acoustics and all the intricacies and subtleties that only someone with as much listening experience as John can know.

So first of all: Thank you so much to everyone who...

I recently stumbled across this really small, understated Facebook post by audio interface manufacturer RME that led to an even more understated entry on their company forum.

They were simply announcing another feature update to TotalMix FX, the management software for their interfaces.

But what...

Are you hearing your low end properly? 

Or there's some imbalance there that’s messing you up? 

Maybe you've even done some measurements that revealed some bad dips in the frequency response.

Or your speakers are just really small and you want some more low frequency extension to...

Let's talk about flush mounting speakers. 

This is where you basically build your speakers right into the front wall of your studio. 

Maybe you've seen this around, especially from high grade mastering studios.

And if you've asked about speaker placement on some forum, somebody surely...

In my opinion there's one development in speaker system design that has largely been ignored by studio monitor companies:

Matching speaker directivity to a given space.

It's a little weird.

Designers of big venue sound systems have been developing and refining this technique for about 30 years...

So you know Dolby Atmos, right?

It’s been quite the hype lately. And justifyingly so.

Some things tell me it’s here to stay.

But it’s a new technology!

For us sound engineers, there’s still quite a barrier to entry.

Price is a major problem.

A Dolby Atmos system with even...

The low end in a home studio is a funny beast. I’m sure this isn’t news to you.

While you’re battling standing waves with everything you’ve got on one side, speaker boundary interference comes in to give you a hard low jab from the other side, only for the floor...

Every once in a while when you're setting up speakers in a new room, you find that the phantom center ends up just that slight bit shifted to the side.

It's not crazy strong, but definitely noticeable.

And that even though you spent a not insignificant amount of time making sure the...

Are you one of those people who collects speakers like they're sneakers?

A different pair for each day of the week? (You know who you are..)

But even if you've just got that one set and it's not really working for you.

You can't really hear what's going on in the music, balancing is...

If there was ever a set of misused terms in acoustics, then it’s "near field", "mid field", and "far field" speakers.

Don’t get me wrong. 

There’s a useful distinction to be made between various sizes of speakers.

But it actually has nothing to do with what near...