If you can’t take the room out of your mix, you can’t take your mix out of the room!
Peter D’Antonio · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2003
The key issue in any recording studio is transferability—the ability of a mix to transfer to other listening environments outside the studio. For a mix to faithfully transfer to a wide range of acoustical environments, it must be created in a room with minimal acoustic distortion. The music industry is very aware of electronic distortion; however, the audible effects of acoustic distortion are only now being fully appreciated. The four forms of acoustic distortion are modal coupling, speaker boundary interference response, comb filtering and poor diffusion or a sparse spatial and temporal reflection density. These phenomena will be explained and methods to minimize them will be suggested.