Here we are in sunny Los Angeles—actually sunny Los Angeles after a lot of rain, God bless that. We're at Jim Kaufman's production studio, and we're going to meet up with Hush P. Hush has a company called Sense & Sound, kind of an all-in-one solution for your studio. We love what he does because he comes into the room and designs everything.

Hush Paz is not just an acoustician—he is a full-on studio designer. So the racks, the gear, the panels, the soundproofing—every single little nook and cranny. After meeting him, I thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to go to a studio that he designed from the ground up and really help educate us on everything: racks, acoustic panels, speaker placement, you name it. This is going to be a rather wonderful little video. So let's go and meet Hush.

How are you? Hello hello, good to see you. So I just gave everybody a little synopsis—I went like, the racks, the acoustic panels, the soundproofing, the speaker placement—you did the whole thing.

I did the whole thing.

Okay, so I suppose the dumb question is: where do you start? If somebody says, "This is my space," where do you start?

Studio design, and design in general, starts at the end and you work backwards. I start with the workflow. I ask the client—the producer, composer, engineer—what is the workflow they want the studio to enable. A studio needs to serve your workflow. If it's not serving your workflow, it's a bit of a waste of time.

So in this case you went to the producer, Jim Kaufman, and said, "What's your workflow?" What was his answer?

They gave me a description. We met at his last studio. They said, “We just finished recording a Helmet record and the labels were still on the gear with their names.” And you know, "We track drums, we do this, do guitars." He kind of walks me through everything. I ask him questions about the types of instruments he records, the way he likes to work, his pain points, and what he wishes he could do. And then I know what the studio should do essentially.

Specifically, what is it he wanted?

Jim is a classical engineer/producer. He likes recording live, real performances—as much human interaction as possible, as much real-time processing, real instruments, real amps. So this was an ADU. This was the kitchen over there, the living room over here, and the bedroom was over there. He wanted to be able to record a live rhythm section all in one go. And you know, sometimes you replace things, but to have the convenience of hearing the drums through the microphones and not through the wall.

So there's a start there. They were already kind of tracking through the equipment. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel for the clients usually. When people come to me, they're already working full-time. I just go in and say, "If you do this, you won't have to do that, and then you'll clear out time or be able to do both of these at once."

In this case, I asked them about layering synthesis. They used to have things everywhere, but they'd have to pull them off the shelf, plug it in, try some stuff, get the layer, figure out what they want, then track it. I said, "What if everything was in one place—all of the synths, all of the pedals that you send signal to for sound design, the reamp pedal to send and return to the high-Z equipment—all in one place, so that you just have a station and just audition, audition, audition?"

In this case, you have all the synths going into this summing amp, and then the summing amp goes into the wall. We have tie lines behind the sound design station that reach back into the patch bay, and he doesn't need to have separate inputs to the S. I said, "Let’s put a summing amp. You just have stereo in going in, audition, audition—I like this—track it." Instead of pulling off the shelf and connecting and gaining it, it's showing up in the patch but you can still patch it through whatever preamp or outboard he wants.

So you already knew all of the gear that he had?

Yeah. We rearranged it. I created it on the computer so we could see what would fit where, how we could compartmentalize and save space. Where should this sit in the studio? In the last studio, he had it kind of 90 degrees to him—it was actually causing reflection issues at the speakers. I said, “Let’s open it up.” It opens up the room, it opens up the sound. It’s convenient for him to cooperate—if he's sitting here and his assistant Ryan is sitting here, they’re kind of ready to work together.

So it’s both ergonomic design and signal flow design. I think of what needs to be within hands reach, what needs to be a chair roll away, and what you have to get up and get off the shelf for.

And so he's mostly a tracking producer?

Yes. So, preamps within hand’s reach—loves his APIs, his Neves. Here's where you do the tonal shaping—it funnels into the outboard, which is ready to go. I'm not sure how much they tweak it often; it might be mostly set, but this they tweak for every performer obviously.

Speaker placement—obvious things. I know you have some very strong opinions about speaker placement. So how do you choose where to put the speakers?

Speaker placement is a step within studio orientation. Generally speaking, speaker placement is the difference between a useful studio and a useless studio, to some extent. I would take $150 used KRKs placed correctly over $13,000 ATCs or PMCs, hands down, without looking back. I would prefer that first studio. I would have a better time. It would be easier to make decisions. They would translate better.

When I bought my first pair of expensive speakers and I didn’t quite know how to place them yet, I didn’t have an easier time making decisions. They didn’t translate. It was just very impressive.

There’s the basics: the equilateral—that’s kind of what everybody knows—the 60° triangle. Thinking of speaker placement, you want to set what it is you want to hear. What you're really listening for is the soundstage. You want to have accurate reproduction of your soundstage. That means mid information balanced to side information. Things that are up at the front balanced relative to things further back—the depth, if you will. You want frequency balance, lows to highs, and on top of that, dynamic balance. That comes more into the acoustic modifications, but things can react differently between low and high volumes, and differently between transients and steady-state response. That’s what you’re looking for.

The 60° thing is mostly about the balance of the mids to sides in stereo reproduction—30° left, 30° right, that’s the standard. If you sit that way, the balance of mid to side information within your soundstage will be balanced to each other. As you make decisions about the balance of vocals, kick, bass, relative to double-track guitars or hard-panned elements, and you leave the room—it should translate.

Do you subscribe to the tweeter just passing your ear, not directly in the middle of your head?

Yes. Correct. But that’s down to speaker design. Generally speaking, most speakers have a little on-axis cone that’s a bit excited. You might want to miss that. But speaker placement is about the geometry of the room. The triangle is just about where you sit relative to the speakers. Where your speakers go is about the shape of the structure.

There are rules out there—simplified guidelines that are well-meaning but not always useful. Like “you should have your speakers off the front wall,” or “all the way up against the front wall”—there’s never just one case or the other. It depends on the shape of the room.

When I assess a space, the Sense & Sound speaker placement protocol looks at the modal positions in the room and reflections. People tend to give too much space to the modes—too much attention—and not enough to reflections. It’s been my experience that reflections cause most of the alterations in the sound that you hear.

I look at a series of reflections. Modes are simple: you have equal divisions of the space. Halfway point of the room—bass cannot exist. Whatever that length is, that frequency won’t exist there. Double that frequency will be too loud. Triple it will again not exist. The dead center of the room is a hot spot. One thing people can look out for: whatever shape room they’re in, they don’t want to position themselves exactly dead center. It’s not going to work out.

There’s a rule out there called the 38% rule. I actually didn’t know about it—I just had my own speaker placement system, and I kept coming back to the 38% position. Then I read about it online. Oh, okay—it’s a thing. It’s about avoiding modes. Halfway of the room is the fundamental, then you have a third of the room, a quarter of the room. Notice that’s where the acoustics are placed. You're trying to avoid those places. So 38% of the room is not on the third, not on the half—it's in between modes. So your ears are not in a spot where one frequency or another is being boosted by the modal behavior of the room.

Separately from that, reflection-wise, we have the speaker placement protocol. You have front wall reflections, front corner reflections, sidewall reflections, opposite wall reflections—very important for imaging—then back wall reflections, and back corner reflections.

All of these geometries—you can think of them like shooting pool. When you play pool and need to shoot the white ball off the wall to hit something else, you kind of instinctively know the angle. It's the same idea here. The front wall reflection is coming off the speaker, hitting about where that panel ends, then bouncing back. That panel is positioned to steer it out of the way.

Now, the question everyone's probably thinking is: how do you take reflections into account with all the obvious gear in the room—the sidecar, the rack-mounted gear, the screen? Is it just about making the best of a difficult situation?

That is the rub. That’s the Rubik’s Cube. It’s a little Sudoku puzzle. You can fill in the numbers, and the more numbers you fill in, the better you get. Reflections off the wall, as we mentioned—corners at 90° tend to return to center. So if you're sitting where the sound hits a corner and bounces directly back, that’s a problem. But if the sound is bouncing off and missing you, that’s better.

That’s the same for gear. Based on those factors, those speakers ended up where they are, and based on where they are, that dictates where the screen can be. The screen could be closer—it doesn’t need to be—but the main limit is you don’t want it to block the speaker from reaching your opposite ear. If it does, it affects your width perception and the spectral balance for your opposite ear.

Same with equipment. Everything here is angled in a way that it doesn’t reflect back at you. These things act as big diffusers. Sound hits them and breaks apart. Whatever reflects doesn’t reflect at you. Even the rack mount, which is vertical—it’s not bouncing back toward you.

That’s good clarity. People ask that question a lot: “What about my gear?” Also because there's no way to have symmetry in gear. You're not going to say, “I’ve got a KN sidecar, let’s put another one on the right.” Symmetry is super crucial in speaker placement—symmetry to the structure, not to the gear.

Imagine the room was empty. Perfect symmetry to the actual room shape makes the sound behave. The room becomes like a lens. The speakers create sound that travels in all directions, and all those reflections coincide wherever they land. If the speakers are placed symmetrically, you have fewer types of reflections. If one speaker is a little off, they send sound in different directions and create different interferences. But if they're in the same place on each side, it's the same interference—so fewer problems.

Also, again, if the room was empty, the sound comes out, hits all the surfaces, and focuses somewhere. So think of speaker placement like positioning a satellite dish. There's a focal point. It’s not an arc—it’s a square room—but it acts similarly. There’s a focal point where energy accumulates.

I’ve found that wherever you put your speakers, the focal point in the back—where the client couch often sits—is where sound refocuses. So that’s a great place to put the client couch, because it sounds better. I’ve been in studios with a fireplace in the back—plenty of issues—but the listening position is still superb.

It’s always a compromise. Every point is just a couple percent difference. That’s why, if you look around this studio, it’s absolutely plastered with panels.

These panels are not just absorption in a frame—they’re a bit more complicated. But the bottom line is: every single one of them contributes a few percent to the overall picture. No single panel makes a 30% or 20% difference. Sound goes out spherically, and each position modifies the listening spot by a little bit. So the more of these problems you address, the more everything balances out—and the higher the studio’s translation quality goes.

I like that. In recording, I always call it the 1% rule. The 2% rule works well too. You just make everything a little bit better, and by the end of it, you’ve actually got something that’s significantly better.

But I do have to emphasize—speaker placement is not part of that 2% rule. It’s an 80% difference.

An 80% difference?

Yes. In my mind, an 80% difference.

How close should the speakers be to the front wall here?

That’s literally only a function of the geometry of the space. There is no “bigger is better” or “smaller is worse.” It’s not like in small rooms you go close to the wall, and in big rooms you pull away. It depends on the specifics—width, height, depth, what frequencies are being reflected and canceled, where reinforcement happens.

As you move the speaker around within the shape of the room, there will be a position where some interferences line up with constructive ones and cancel each other out—or at least don’t stack into severe boosts and cuts. That will dictate where they want to be.

So maybe a 13x17 foot room wants the speakers right up against the front wall. But a 14.5x17 might want them two feet out. And a 16x17 might want them forward again. It’s not linear or straightforward.

So the best thing you can do is start with your listening position at the 38% mark, and place the speakers where it makes sense for that spot. In this case, 38% didn’t work for him. This is one of those examples—it’s only a starting point.

Yeah, I was thinking this is probably more like 25%, isn’t it?

This would be a quarter of the way, so yeah—I’d say about 30% when he's sitting comfortably. But I would start at the 38% mark. Position the speakers where they seem right for that. Use your references. If that doesn’t work for you, move toward the front wall, test that, go narrower, go wider, come back out.

I used to inch them—literally. You have a starting point, then move an inch out, inch in, inch back, inch forward.

Are you measuring this?

Yes. Every engineer should have one of these.

You're making thousands of measurements?

Yes. A tape measure isn’t the tool for that. For mic and speaker placement, you want to make sure your speakers are accurate down to the fraction of an inch. When you do that, the soundstage lines up. The transient response clears up. When it’s slightly off, things get murky. When it’s exactly on, the mono center sounds like a third speaker. Harmonic distortion clears up.

When the speakers are slightly off, there’s ever-so-slight comb filtering in the higher frequencies. When you clear that up, it improves the resolution.

So when you're coarsely placing your speakers, maybe you’re listening for the broader picture—where’s the bass cut, where’s the boost, how’s the soundstage. But once you’ve found a position you like, you use the laser. Measure to the structure. Make sure it’s exact. When symmetry is exact, it’s like magic.

It’s like—“What did you just do?”

“I just moved your speaker.”

It’s what happens 80% of the time. I walk in, do the speaker placement—pretty quickly now, I’ve done it a hundred times—and it feels like a con. Like, “You were here for an hour, but the sound completely transformed.”

You didn’t even add anything.

Yeah. But your speakers were six inches off from each other. Now they’re not. So half of the problems are gone. And I moved them into a position where the geometry of the room halves the problems even further. They’re now exactly lined up, so the phantom center is perfect. The mid-to-side balance is correct. Translation goes through the roof.

Amazing. Welcome to Jim Kaufman’s new studio. This would obviously be the “before”...

One, two...

Jim Kaufman’s “after” video.

One, two...

We touched on panels for a second. Are you saying that each one of these panels has different absorption capabilities? They’re all structured differently? They’re not identical panels that you put everywhere?

No. Almost all of these panels are the same series. We have four series of panels. The Superior Balance Series, as I’ve described, has multiple layers, different shapes, and structures—all to make it as neutral as possible across the frequency spectrum and dynamic response, so that transients and steady-state respond as similarly and consistently as possible.

If you fill a room with a lot of these, instead of getting a muffled, no-midrange sound, you get a neutral sound. One of the comments I hear most from clients is, “My mic sounds the best it ever has.” Because it's balanced for speech.

We tuned all of these designs both by talking at the panel, and then placing a speaker on a stand and playing reference tones at it. I listen from all sorts of angles and tweak the design until I don’t hear any phasiness or dynamic/spectral imbalance.

So that’s these.

We also have Neutralizer Panels—which I should probably rename. They’re our live room panels. The drum room is filled with Neutralizers. If you touch these, they have a hard face.

Oh okay.

They have similar insides to the Superior Balance panels, but the top balancing layer is different. The face of them is meticulously designed to reflect and diffuse in a way that works well in live spaces.

When we put these in a room—small or large—it becomes this big, fat, punchy space that has a sound. It’s going to be hard to hear in the cymbals, sure, but this room is not “dead.”

Dead is not useful.

No, not for drums. And not for a lot of acoustic instruments.

That’s the second series.

These panels tend to work lower down in frequency, so we also use them in the control room—in corners or bass-heavy positions.

The third kind of panel we have is the Dihedrals—the ones meeting between walls and ceiling.

Yeah.

Those are specific pain points—POS positions—in a space, so we created a panel specifically for that.

I don’t want it to absorb too much. Again, when you have so many objects, I want it to absorb less. I want it to absorb the correct amount, and reflect and diffuse the correct amount, so that when you end up putting it everywhere, it still sounds balanced.

That’s why we created the Dihedrals.

And the last series?

The last series is called the Subdus. The Subdus are kind of our "I wasn't asking" sort of panel. It's no longer asking the sound to behave—it’s a stop panel.

You know those runways where trucks or race cars need to slow down if their brakes fail?

Sure.

That’s what these are. Multiple layers of absorption—substantially more inside. There’s a diffusive sheet inside that the wavefront passes through, but it kind of cheese-grates it. Then it hits thicker absorption layers. Behind that is mass-loaded vinyl. So nothing really comes back—no reflection. But whatever does reflect, it’s balanced.

That’s the very corner panel there?

Yes. In this studio, we have the corner Subdus. We don’t have the early reflection version here, but there's also a triangular-shaped version for those positions.

I’ve noticed there's one phrase you haven’t said once. I'm sure Eric’s thinking the same thing.

What’s that?

Bass trap.

Yeah. No. I don’t like it.

There is no bass trapping?

No bass trapping.

Like I said before, people tend to overemphasize modal behavior. Bass trapping is essentially about pressure accumulating in corners. That is one aspect of the issue. And you will address it when you put panels in corners. But what affects your sound more is reflection cancellations.

Corners are a problem not because bass accumulates and gets trapped, but because sound hits them and comes back at you. And because that path is long, it creates low-frequency holes—it causes cancellations.

So the whole concept of "bass traps" is convenient language for marketing. It’s not really a good technical concept.

I like your style.

Yeah, because as we were pointing at that panel, I thought: that’s traditionally what somebody would’ve said is a bass trap. And I didn’t hear you say that.

And the Dihedrals are not trapping bass either. I don’t like 45° angles. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everything here is 30°, or 15°, but no 45s—except for these.

So here we have these—what would you call them? Almost tiles—on the ceiling?

These are polygon diffusers.

Polygon diffusers. And what is their role? Just to randomize high frequencies so they go in different directions?

Honestly, it’s to diffuse light. When the different light sources hit them, they create a very cool look. That was the main reason we put them up. The room would’ve sounded relatively similar without them.

Okay.

They do work above 1kHz. They just don’t do much below that. For an object to modify sound, it has to be at least two-thirds the size of the wavelength. These won’t work below about 700Hz. Below that, they’re essentially flat to the sound wave.

So it helps some high-mid clarity and intelligibility, but within the context of the listening position, it’s all out of your shot anyway. So this was mostly a visual design choice.

Oh, it’s cool. I like that. And it works very well visually. They’re definitely striking. When you walk in, you notice them immediately—the way the light hits them. It helps the room not look like a box. Looks less like a box with panels.

Exactly.

Another important aspect of the Sense & Sound fidelity formula that guides our studio design is degradation.

Degradation?

Yes. For some reason, this is a contested subject in the industry. Half the people are like, “What are you talking about?” But I follow my ears.

As you should.

I used to produce records. Degradation is this hidden cost that permeates everything in sound. You can relate to it in mixing. You layer 17 plugins on a track—every one gives you something, but takes away something else.

Like in business—you want the sum to be more than the source. But if it’s costing you more than it’s giving, you’re losing.

That’s degradation.

You add a plugin—some clarity was lost, but you got the effect. That’s degradation.

In studio design, degradation creeps up everywhere. Mostly in cables. Cables are this not-to-be-spoken-of topic, but they’re a thing. They have a sound. They modify the signal passing through them—very gently, but kind of like acoustic panels: a little bit here, a little bit there. In an analog studio with a full patch bay, routing in and out of gear—those percentages add up.

Paying attention to signal degradation through cables, matching impedance correctly between equipment—especially in high-Z chains like guitar pedals and amps—is huge.

I see people patching things however they like, then wondering why their signal sounds weird. I say, “Try this.” Plug, plug, plug. And suddenly it opens up.

“What just happened?”

You just cut out all the degradation.

Same goes for speaker cables. Same goes for converters.

When I do speaker placement, the service is called “Speaker Placement and Calibration.” The calibration part is that I’ll often turn the speaker down and turn the converter up.

Because the highest resolution of the converter is at the top of its range. If you’re living at low levels because the speakers are loud, you’re only getting half the resolution.

So that’s one form of degradation—converter gain staging.

Another is mismatched cables.

Another is transmission loss through stands.

These objects under the speakers—you see them? They’re called NAS. They’re a sandwich of granite, vinyl, concrete, and ensolite.

I was wondering what they were.

Yeah. That one has wood at the bottom—that’s an XL version where we had to attach an extra layer. But yeah, if you hold one of these—if you can, because it’s heavy—and knock on it, it feels like you’re knocking on concrete.

The purpose of the object is to present such high acoustic impedance to the speaker chassis that sound energy prefers to go back into the air instead of down into the stand.

Sound always follows the path of least resistance. So if the path downward is now higher resistance than the air path, more energy stays in the air. That's good.

My absolute pet peeve is foam under speakers.

I was just about to ask you that! I was thinking it the whole time.

All it does is allow the speaker chassis to move. Newton says if the speaker cone goes forward, the chassis goes backward. If the foam lets it move, it will. That’s transients being lost—not going to your ears, but absorbed into the foam.

Get the foam off.

Fantastic. What do you think of those kind of ISO pucks?

The pucks are good. Their strategy is concentrating the transmission path through narrower points—less surface area. That’s good.

We use the ISO pucks.

That’s okay. They’re about decoupling—which is a different goal from helping the speaker perform. Not the same thing. They do have some give, but that give is higher impedance in the audio band.

Still, I’ve found that nothing beats pure mass.

That makes perfect sense.

Yeah. A lot of mastering rooms just use big cinder blocks instead of stands.

Absolutely. I’ve always loved the way a drum kit sounds on a solid concrete floor. You can put a carpet on top—it makes zero difference if it’s thin. But whenever I put drums on a riser, I always felt like I lost low end.

Yes. You did.

You lost low end, and you lost transient impact. The energy from the drummer’s impact just goes into the riser instead of the membrane. It’s gone.

Here you have a mockup of the studio?

Yes. This is the project through which we designed this studio. We had an extensive back and forth—deciding what should go where, how to modify that wall, how to improve the isolation between the rooms, calculating signal paths, and designing this sound design station.

I initially drew it up just so I’d know where things would be, so I’d know where to put the panels.

Did you break the floor?

No. That was up to the client. One of the hardest things to determine in this business is the line past which the client doesn’t care. I found where that line was for Jim—how far he wanted to go with isolation. He’s been happy. So we made the right decision for him.

But we didn’t break the floor. That’s not a completely isolated room. When they drum, it does bleed into the house. It’s just minimal this way.

So you can make decisions.

Okay. To be really blunt—everything in music gear has contentious opinions. But I think studio design and studio acoustics is one of the most explosive. Everyone has an opinion. And then… war.

Just off camera, you said you hoped this would help people coming up get clarity on these topics.

I like that.

Let’s go over to the room.

This is beautiful. So when you came in—minus the kitchen—the window wasn’t there?

No. The window wasn’t there.

So you put the window in?

Yes. The kitchen is gone. You walked in—this was going to be the live room, logically. He wanted a glass here, for line of sight.

He wanted it more to the left, but I said, “This is an important acoustic position. We want a panel here. You don’t want a window here.”

Right. That makes sense. I understand why he’d want it more to the left—to glance and see the drummer—but acoustically that panel is more important.

Exactly.

More crucial for him was that the rhythm section players sitting here would have line of sight—which they do. And he has line of sight to the vocalist.

Great.

Major challenges for me, looking at this, is: how do you get separation between the live room and the control room?

We talked earlier—this wasn’t a break-the-floor situation. What did you do to get the best isolation between the rooms?

We really just reinforced this wall and the door. We were going to add the windows, so we were doing construction anyway. That wall was getting opened.

We needed to add cables to that wall. So again, we were opening it anyway. We also redid the power feeding the racks. Everything here is powered through a MAP Balanced EquiTech sound cleaner.

So the power goes into that and then back into the wall?

Correct. We ran new cables inside the walls using twisted pair—not twisted along with the ground. That’s a little trick to clean up the power—minimizing degradation.

Specifically, twisted pair with no 90° angles—but the ground isn’t twisted with them.

So the ground goes down the middle and the others twist around it?

No—separate cable. Separate.

And that’s feeding all of this?

Yes. So we were going to open the walls anyway. What we did was open that wall and build a second set of studs—a staggered stud configuration. That way, the studs touching this side of the wall aren’t connected to the other side.

Completely separate studs.

Since doing this, there’s been this product called Hush Frames. And they’re phenomenal.

It’s not affiliated with me—I know the name sounds funny.

It’s not yours?

Nope. Not my thing. But it’s this little object that’s very good—like a smaller, cheaper, wooden version of ISO clips with hat channels.

But it gives you more options for less money. The best thing you can do is staggered studs with Hush Frame. That’s just the ideal.

Staggered studs aren’t expensive. Another set of studs with a ¾" layer isn’t much loss of space or cost. And it does decouple the wall skins. That’s what we did isolation-wise.

I could show you the harmonic guides—that’s the modes—and I could show you the reflection guides of the speaker, color-coded by material. If we put the speakers back into the studio model, here we go…

This is all the reflection analysis coming off the speakers—where things are hitting, essentially.

That’s fascinating.

And that’s not even all of them—just the largest, most fundamental ones. Then, if we add the panels on top of that, we’re aiming to catch and redirect every possible reflection.

We had the clouds, and then had to add extra clouds up there to catch another reflection. But in general, my approach with reflections is this:

Everyone’s hyper-focused on absorption. And they’re focusing on resonances and room modes too much. Reflections are like kung fu—it’s easier to redirect the punch away from you than to stop it head-on.

If you’re trying to stop a 50Hz wavefront, you’ll need more absorption than you have room for. It’s much easier to just not have it come back at you.

The kung fu of redirecting sound.

That’s how I approach back walls. I’m not claiming to have invented this—non-reflection zones are not a new concept—but I systemize it for modern room conversions and studio design.

For example: these hard-faced panels behind us have a hard back too. That way, transients don’t just pass through and bounce off the wall behind them and come back at you. Instead, they hit the panel and get redirected.

They’re positioned with angles so that the wavefront hits and bounces away—not back to the listening position.

Same for the side panels. They’re angled, too. Whatever comes off the speaker hits them and reflects away from you.

Most importantly, we take into account opposite reflections.

Because when you’re sitting here and the left speaker hits the right wall and comes back at your right ear—that’s bad. It narrows the stereo image, confuses positional information, and alters the phase perception. It changes how the sound impacts you.

So we do this reflection analysis and build the panels such that whatever does get reflected, gets reflected away from the critical listening zone.

Again—not a new concept. The "non-reflection zone" has been around forever. But we balance that with having absorption where it’s needed and not where it’s not.

We’re essentially turning the room into a folded-in diffuser.

We look at the acoustic impedance of the space. Wherever the impedance accumulates—which happens at the modes—we put an object there to increase resistance. Wherever the impedance is low, we leave it clear. That way, we balance out the impedance across the room and create a balanced sound across the entire space.

What about this space now? It’s a tracking room. Totally makes sense.

There’s a pair of speakers here. I’m sure he can mix in here as well.

Oh, it’s a mixing room. Absolutely.

But what about for the person who wants huge speakers—maybe not soffit-mounted, but something that projects all the way to the back of the room? What kind of challenges does that bring?

Because obviously we’ve got speakers here. But if someone had huge speakers projecting straight through the room, is it compromise on compromise?

There are two aspects to that.

First: speaker placement is a geometric function. In reality, you can probably only place one set of speakers in the ideal position for the room. That means additional sets of speakers will be a compromise.

You cannot place three sets of speakers in any room—all in ideal positions. Unless you're building something with non-reflective architecture and a very specific geometry.

Some speakers will be too wide, too narrow, too high, or in positions that just don’t work for balance.

Now—you can set multiple sets up, but with each one, you’ll need to shift your listening position. But when you move, you’re also moving through the modal structure of the room. Reflections change. So it’s never going to be perfect for all of them.

You have to prioritize one set of speakers.

Now, there are three or four types of monitoring.

You have:

1. High-resolution monitoring – like these PMC-style monitors. These give you detail like a magnifying glass. You trust them. They show you everything.

2. Low-resolution monitoring – speakers that purposely don’t give you every little detail. Like HS8s, or just cheaper 2-ways. These are helpful when you want to make musical decisions without getting distracted by tiny imperfections.

3. Shitboxes – monitors that are band-passed, distorted, or limited in spectral range. These help you judge how things sound on crappy consumer playback systems.

4. Big PA speakers – these aren’t for EQing or balancing. They’re for feeling. For excitement. For blasting loud and seeing what it feels like. Useful when you want to hype the band, or check how a chorus will land on a festival stage.

It’s all about workflow, again.

You’re thinking about when in the process you’re going to use each type of monitoring. What you care about is that each set does its job in that moment.

You’re probably not EQ’ing off the PA system. You’re probably just checking, “Does this feel good when it’s loud?” Or you’re exciting the band. Or hyping the artist for a moment in the session.

And it’s okay if those aren’t perfectly balanced. Or maybe they’re more balanced back there than they are up front. That’s okay too. You can even position them so their focal point is over by the sofa or somewhere else—where the workflow occurs.

Again, working with the geometry of the room.

Great. So go to the website. You can sign up for the mailing list for more information.

And Hush is saying he’s actually going to start producing videos on this exact topic—so stay tuned.

Thank you ever so much. Really appreciate it.

Go to senseandsound.com—there will be a link down there as well. I’m sure Eric will fly one around.

Put it where, Eric? Here? No? No?

Yeah.

Thanks, everyone!

See you soon. Ciao. Goodbye.