Calibration and Reference Music
calibration, implementing reference material
Introduction
Our production environment acoustics can help us achieve a better result faster, or lead
to a frustrating process of revisions. Productions often don’t sound how we expect
when listened outside the studio.
Listening Environment Tuning
Making your frequency and mix decisions in a tuned or calibrated room or listening
environment will have the biggest impact on your result and your confidence. When
checking mixes in the car, club, bluetooth speaker, headphones or wherever will be less
surprising and sound more like you intended.
Creating a calibrated room was expensive and time-consuming and took some
dedicated hardware eq. Most major studios and certainly any film or TV mix stage,
suite or room has a sort of calibration applied. A process using several high end
microphones and some test equipment to sent tones and frequencies into the room
through the studio speakers and analyze the result and difference, then adjust the eq to
compensate. Removing unwanted frequency buildup and putting back in areas where
the frequency gets canceled out or just overall flattening out the speakers and room
interaction.
In the last few years, this process became easy and easy, cheap and available on
headphones via Sonarwoks
Sonarworks
Sonarworks is a room measurement and room correction software that is essential for
almost anybody mixing in almost any environment. You start by using a microphone to
measure the room (via their guided app) to figure out the frequency response of your
room. After you’ve got the room measurement, you just turn Sonarworks on and let it
do its thing – correct the room with an inverse curve.
Additionally, Sonarworks has also measured hundreds of headphones which allows you
to “flatten” your headphones. So even if relegated to working in headphones you can
have a calibrated listening environment. Genius!
One thing to keep in mind is that as we move into making decisions about volume,
sound field placement and dynamics, eq, and so on we want to set ourselves up to
make the best decisions we can. One way to do this is to make sure we are monitoring
at an appropriate level to help our ears hear the flattest frequency response.
Here is my Room before and after calibration in Sonarworks Reference 4
Before:
After:
----
Listening Level
Based on the research we know the ear and brain and interpret the flattest frequency response
at a moderately loud level, too loud or too low we hear and interpret frequencies differently. The
often talked about a listening level of 85 dB SPL was originally designed for Mixing movies in a
large sound stage or movie theater and we have realized that with speakers much closer to our
ears in much smaller rooms we need to adjust that level down.
Before we start making any adjustments to volume/gain on individual tracks we used our SPL
meter to set a listening level averaging about 77 dB SPL.
Looking at the chart below you see that an average bedroom studio listening level would be
closer to 74 dB SPL. I have found a nice comfortable 77 works good for me in a small treated
room about 1200 cu ft.
I researched quite a bit a few years ago and two of the most accurate smartphone
meters are:
iOS
SPLnFFT (deep detail on web site) (App Store link) $3.99
SLA Lite (or full version) (web site detail) (App Store Link) Lite is free - full $5.99
Android
Sound Meter (by abc apps) (App Store link)
Here’s a small bit of a larger article comparing the accuracy of many smartphone SPL
meter apps and what lead me to those choices. (full article here)
“SLA Lite andSPLnFFT should be utilized due to their ability to measure with
less variability around the mean noise level. In fact, SLA Lite was the only app
accurate to within ±2 dB(A) across all of the reference conditions –
background, 50, 70 and 90 dB(A) – even though other apps such as SPLnFFT
(iOS) and Sound Meter (Android) performed relatively well.”
Reference Material
Reference Material has a significant impact when moving a mix forward to completion. Utilizing
them to help create perspective around the frequency range and to help mixes come together.
Especially when in less than ideal mixing situations, even in headphones. The importance is to
find sample productions you think sounds good and then have a few of those in the highest
quality you can find, WAV file download, or CD - 16 bit is perfectly fine for this.
The idea here is like setting up a target, a frequency target, something to aim for as we “mix” the
track. A way of resetting frequency perspective when pressing play in the studio for a
productive day of work. A way to reset your ears and brain and pull them back into your
listening environment and remember what good sounding music sounds like there thus helping
set a target for your mix.
Mastering engineers listen to a lot of music in the studio to get to know what the listening
environment is SUPPOSED to sound like so they can then make adjustments to the music they
are responsible for making sounds great.
In order to utilize the reference tracks accurately, we will need to level match them to one
another and then of course later to our actual Mix. We do this using LUFS Metering
What is LUFS
LUFS (Loudness Unit Full Scale) is a recently created and updated way of analyzing loudness
that is more closely aligned with how we hear. It has the ability to listen INTO a piece of music
and give it a loudness number regardless of how compressed or limited the track itself is.
This technology is what streaming services use to level match all the various songs they stream,
songs that span generations and yet still can provide a cohesive listening experience after level
matching via LUFS numbers.
This allows us to use MASTERED tracks as references and when level matched via a LUFS
meter to the track we are working on we can get a very accurate sense of where our mix sits
along the frequency spectrum when compared to those references.
Free LUFS Meter plugins
Here are a couple of links for free LUFS Meter plugins.
Youlean Loudnes Meter
DP Meter 4
----
Pick Reference tracks
Using 3-5 reference tracks helps us hear a RANGE across the frequency spectrum showing us
where we should be sitting in terms of low, mid and high frequencies as some songs may be
heavier in some areas and light in others but the multiple references can show us where we
need to be hitting.
Edit the Reference tracks
Edit each track down to the “meat” or drop and or a few seconds - like 15 to 30 or so before and
after. The entire 3-5 reference tracks only need about 3-4 mins of time when edited down to the
meat, versus the 20 or so unedited.
Use the reference tracks within the session, all on one audio track starting after the end of your
production session (makes jumping back and forth really easy when zoomed out.
Level Matching Reference Tracks
Level match the tracks starting at the clip/region level and roughly get the same LUFS level of
-10 LUFS. Using -10 LUFS since it has worked out to be a simple and very useful number based
on many many songs I have analyzed as a workflow that we can follow all the way through
mastering.
Use clip/region gain to adjust the extra dB or so for each of the edited reference tracks to
achieve about the same LUFS. Then once the clips or regions of the reference music track are
leveled to one another in our mix session that entire track can be brought down via the fader to
match the LUFS of our mix or production mix session.
Once pretty well level matched so a fairly consistent level is reached across the reference tracks
and they have been edited down you can easily
1. Import or copy and paste that track into whatever session you are working on so only
needing to make 1 session track filled with level matched reference music.
2. Export the edited and LUFS Level matched clips as a few small audio files for other
uses, other DAWs, Car tests, collaborations.
You could also then merge to one audio file making a little, level matched, edited audio
file easy to import from session to session or take with you for level matched reference
listening.
