Preferences of Critical Listening Environments Among Sound Engineers

This paper studies the preference of nine critical listening environments among fifteen sound engineers. The spatial room impulse responses are measured in studio control rooms with a microphone array, encoded with the Spatial Decomposition Method, and played back in an anechoic chamber with a 30-channel loudspeaker reproduction system. The results of tests show that the preference depends on the occupation of the sound engineer and on the song. Mixing engineers prefer an acoustically dry environment with high clarity. In contrast, mastering engineers prefer more reverberant environments with less clarity. Interviews with the sound engineers verify these findings.