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I'm interested in finding out which frequencies are emphasized or attenuated in the room where I listen to playback and try to mix. I know there exist proprietary solutions for some monitoring systems which can do this - they do it by placing a microphone in the room and running various sounds through the speakers, and measuring the output. Based on the results, it's possible to create an EQ curve that matches your room.

I don't have any such system. I have a set of generic microphones and a pair of ordinary monitor speakers.

Does there exist any software packages that can perform this kind of correction on a generic system like this?

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You'll want to try Room EQ Wizard.

Pretty full featured, as per the website:

REW is a Java application for measuring room acoustics and analysing room and loudspeaker responses. It includes tools for generating test signals; measuring SPL and impedance; measuring frequency and impulse responses; generating phase, group delay and spectral decay plots, waterfalls, spectrograms and energy-time curves; generating real time analyser (RTA) plots; calculating reverberation times; calculating Thiele-Small parameters; determining the frequencies and decay times of modal resonances; displaying equaliser responses and automatically adjusting the settings of parametric equalisers to counter the effects of room modes and adjust responses to match a target curve.

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If you're going to "pink" your room you need more than just measurement software. Unless one of your generic microphones is a measurement mic you are fighting an uphill battle. All mics have different frequency responses and coincidentally a mic that has reasonably flat response (measurement mics) actually sound worse to us (for recording) than mics that don't have perfect response. What I'm getting at is if you are using even a 58 there is a huge "presence" bump in the frequency response in the high mids. This will translate in the software as being a room anomaly that will take away the high mids unnecessarily. A decent measurement mic doesn't have to be expensive either, even a Behringer mic will do a good job (I can't believe I said that). Also you need a good pink noise source a la GTC NP1. Lastly, when you do your measurement you will need to run the pink noise at the same level you mix at, otherwise you will end up with mixes that don't translate as well. Depending on the size of the room different volumes will affect how the room sounds.

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  • Thanks for the great answer (and +1 for teaching me about measurement mics!). Is there a particular one you'd recommend?
    – Warrior Bob
    Jul 24, 2011 at 19:41
  • @Brandon -- the good thing is that the curves for eg the 58 are well known so you can apply them simply enough if you don't have a flat response mic.
    – Rory Alsop ♦
    Jul 25, 2011 at 20:41

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