ACOUSTICS 00 - Sound treatment, acoustic treatment of your studio

Having excellent studio monitors, a great sound card, and a wide range of high-end equipment and plugins is certainly more than a good starting point for achieving professional-quality sound, but it actually represents only half of the journey required to achieve a high-quality mix.

Acoustic treatment of the room is an absolutely fundamental step to finally mix properly and gain precision in adjustments as well as save time during mixing.

Sound, by its very nature, requires considerable technical knowledge to ensure a reliable final result. The room and its acoustic treatment must actually be considered the most important element of the mixing process, as its influence has a huge impact on our settings. From my experience, I can assure you that as long as the room is not treated, it will be impossible to do precise work.

The goal, just like with studio monitors, is to achieve the most neutral sound possible, the purest. And it is clear that this represents a real challenge.

As of today, I am writing this guide to summarize my knowledge on the subject and to testify that before this point, absolutely all of my mixes contained errors due to poor room treatment.
Since the room has been properly treated, I no longer have any doubts, I fully control my mixes from A to Z, and I now realize the incredible mistake I was making by trying to adjust equalizers or other settings in an untreated or poorly treated room.

Here, in this guide, I will focus only on room acoustics (sound treatment) and not soundproofing. Acoustic treatment consists of controlling the quality of sound diffusion, whereas soundproofing consists of reducing this diffusion as much as possible.
Simply put, we treat a room to improve listening inside it, and we soundproof it to prevent that sound from reaching neighbors.

In this guide, I will present my method for treating a room by explaining some theory and, above all, a lot of practical advice. I will introduce the different types of treatment and give you my opinion on the equipment available on the market. And unfortunately, although it does not really please me, I will also have to debunk some absolutely ridiculous myths spread by certain amateurs and even professionals that I have read about on the web or seen in videos on YouTube. Many of these people who give advice about mixing, although I believe they are convinced, do not fully understand acoustic issues and lead you toward ineffective pseudo-solutions that waste your time and money.

Hold on, because this guide is quite extensive. It is based on my experience and my "do-it-yourself" (DIY) approach to acoustic treatment.
The guide should be read in chapter order, which is logical, but particularly essential for this topic given its complexity.