[Brent Hahn]

I'm gonna pile onto the room-treatment bandwagon.

Nobody wants to treat their room because room treatment isn't fun, and it's considerable money not spent on "toys," and handling fiberglass is itchy.

But I need to add this: in a one-room studio, you can have drastic acoustic problems and not be able to tell. Because you're playing back your audio in the same problematic space you recorded it in. You have to fix this.

I've just spent the last three weeks mixing an album in a client's home studio. I hadn't been there before, and we spent the first day making sure his DAW and computer were behaving like they should, and updating a few things. In terms of acoustic treatment, this room had so little I could play back audio with my eyes closed and not be able to accurately point my finger at the speakers.

On the second day I hauled in 24 2' X 4' acoustic panels and put them everywhere I could that didn't involve making holes in the walls. Those 24 panels were maybe 2/3 of what the room really needed, and we didn't really address bass and low-mid trapping at all. Which is to say, what I did wasn't extreme, it was on the lower fringe of adequate.