Calibrating my monitors

[jozzafunk]

With a freshly edited session of a short film I recorded sitting on the desktop waiting for mixing I thought I'd recalibrate my monitoring and aimed to get it close to 82dBVu at listening position with pink noise.  I spent a bit of time trying a few other things out, matching levels with tone at 1kHz and 500 Hz, and then pink noise.  I also matched with an aimed condensor and a omni mic into 2 different recorders.  The results were surprising, interesting and concerning.

 

After matching levels with tone my ears could detect what I thought were massive differences in level, even though both mics  - hyper ( MKH50 ) were metering the same levels and the omni ( Cos11 ) was pretty close too.  There was a big peak in range of a very sensitive part of my hearing in the left monitors ( Fr and rear ) at least, and on normal playback there was such a difference in gain on the amps that the levels were way out of wack, reading about 4/5 db difference on the decibel meter but looking more like 8/9 db difference in the DAW.

 

It was quite a wake up to how bad my room is - I've mixed maybe 10 things in there that I've seen on a big screen through a cinema system, and have usually been reasonably happy with how it translated.   The other thing I decided was that any decibel meter app on the iphone is pretty crap, or at least all very different to each other - mostly from most of them not having different weighting options and response times.

 

Anyway, it's an edit suite and not a mix room - the intention is always to mix elsewhere if the project allows.

[rcoronado]

yeah, its always amazing how much the acoustics of any given room can truly affect what you're hearing.  Even in rooms with tons of expensive and well designed acoustic buildout - calibration and measuring can reveal a surprising amount of anomalies. 

 

If your mixes were translating well its likely because you had good source material that didn't need tons of eq to get in the zone.  It's when you get into challenging EQ and panning situations that having a really good sounding room makes the biggest difference.

[Ken Wilkinson]

Try a hardware SPL meter.  Radio Shacks will get the job done.  For a typical sized "edit room"  76 - 79 db would be more appropriate.

[Philip Perkins]

Here's the latest ATSC spec, which gives listening levels for different sizes and sorts of rooms, among lots of other info.

 

philp

atsc 2013A_85-2013.pdf

[ccsnd]

I (among others) covered this in great detail on this forum.

 

Here is the link 

 

most information about calibrating a room can be found there.