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4.4 The virtual control room
After being able to create “virtual loudspeakers”, the next question will be how to place these loudspeakers in a room, as the actual
sound image is composed by the loudspeaker itself and the acoustic characteristics that are added by the room it is standing in. With
other words, your “virtual control room”.
For quite a long time the recording industry has been defining the characteristics of a listening control room. These are defined in
today’s standards such as: OIRT E86/3, IEC 268-13, N 12-A, EBU 3276-2, ITU-R BS.1116, SMPTE 202M, ISO 2969,THX 1138, etc.
The main thing that we learn from of the different standards is that THE perfect control room does not exist, as everyone defines it a
little bit differently. But we also learn what the qualities of a good reference listening room are, namely:
:
• Reverberation time 250 – 400 ms
• Defined room geometry
• Low background noise level
• No strong reflections that alter the sound color
• Highly diffuse reverberation tail
When modelling a virtual control room for the Headzone system, we could have measured out some “legendary” control rooms and
put them into Headzone, but what would the benefit be for you if you were able to work in the virtual “Abbey Road Studios” ? You
have probably never worked there and perhaps never will in your lifetime… and even if you did… perhaps you would not like the
sound of the control room at all.
For the “Headzone Virtual Control Room” we decided to take a different approach: If THE perfect control room doesn’t exist, but
we know the qualities of a good reference listening room... why not allow you to adjust the listening room and create your OWN
perfect control room? In our opinion a good sounding control room is quite a personal thing and therefore flexible within certain
limits. It is perfect when you feel at home and comfortable with the room response and the distance perception. In other words,
when the room sounds plausible to you.
Most importantly, you should always be able to use the same listening conditions, even outside your studio, while recording, or
during listening sessions while travelling. This gives you all the benefits of a true reference listening room, where a sound engineer
can easily judge the quality of a recording. The more you work in that specific room, the easier you will be able to tell how this
would sound in any other environment. In addition, with Headzone, you are only a few mouse clicks away from listening to your
production in different environments to double check that what you have mixed for “living-room” conditions will also sound right in
a small car!
The Headzone virtual control room is therefore based on the qualities of a good reference listening room as described above, but
Headzone also allows the user to custom-design the sound characteristics of a loudspeaker system in a control room with just a few
mouse clicks. Adjustable parameters include all those effects that additionally affect the sound image in a real room and that are
omitted in conventional stereo headphones: the size of the room, the distance of the loudspeaker to the listener and the
characteristics of the control room.
We deliberately incorporated all parameters into just 3 sliders (Room Size, Distance and Ambience), which are easy to understand
and operate within a range of 0 to 100. In fact, when adjusting your personal control room, we want to encourage you to do what
you can do best: use your ears!
Just start playing around with the room parameters in your virtual control room. As soon as you feel that your setting sounds
realistic and convenient, you’ve made it! You’ve created your own reference control room, which you can now take with you
anywhere in the world.