John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

With all of the hundreds of control room designs I have viewed, I have never seen one that illustrates my situation. My location recording work only requires a small edit bay / control room where I compile my live recordings. I have a 4ft x 30" desk as my main work surface with my monitors in the rear corners of the table, raised one foot off of the surface. I will be purchasing this http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/fa/267/0
rackmount line mixer (or something very much like it) later this fall.

The obvious place for this unit is in between my two monitors, are illustrated in the plan and elevation sketches attached. What, if any, impacts can I expect by filling in the space between my monitors like this? In all of the near field monitor setups I have ever seen, I have never seen this space ever utilized, it was always open space. What can I expect if I fill it with a tall (6RU), shallow (10" deep) rack?

Thanks.

Steve (nice name ) I wouldn't worry about it much - the flat face of a rack mixer won't cause any reflections to bad places, if you place patches of absorbent on the walls where first reflections will come from you should be fine. I would recommend that you tilt the speakers in toward the center, so they almost face you - this will widen the "sweet spot" for you.

Have a helper place a mirror against the walls and move it along while you sit at the mix position, and place absorbent wherever you can see either speaker from your chair - do the same for the ceiling, then check the same way on the flat part of your desk - any surface you can place a mirror on and see a reflection of either speaker needs to be either re-aimed or absorbed.

All this stuff is done with standard desk type mixers as well, it improves stereo imaging by minimising the comb filtering caused by early reflections arriving at the mix position out of phase with their direct counterparts, which causes random phase cancellations... Steve