Loudness and room-size was: TV-Mix for Theatre

[Frank Kruse]

Garret,
With all due respect, after reading your post about" calibrating my room" and that you are listening at 65spl and 79 blows your head off, you are over your heard when it comes to dealing with a show that will go into a theater. Do yourself and your client a favor and take one of your mixes or a portion of the show in question and play it back in a "Dub Stage" that is calibrated. It will be an eye (and ear) opener for you!

I thought of starting a new topic instead of hijacking the other.

Speaking of wich there definitely is some connection between roomsize and "felt" loudness. Example: When I listen to a master mixed on a "real" cinema dub-stage in my way smaller edit-room (5.1) wich is also calibrated to 85 even normal dialog almost blows my ears off. Allthough in theory 85 spl at my listening position is EXACTLY the same 85spl on the large scale cinema. When I edit I have found a good level translation at 79spl wich "feels" equivalent to the level I hear when I listen to the exact same sassion 1:1 on the dub-stage. I think Holman has mentioned this problem in one of his books. If I would work at 85spl in my small room and then walk to the dub-stage all my levels would be way to low for someone to have a preview of what I intendet the elements to be.

I always wondered if there are some white-papers that contain investigation on the relationship between the room-size and the "felt" loudness at a given spl level. It makes absolutely no sense to calibrate a 15squaremeter-room to 85dBSPL. The mix will definitely trun out too soft I think.


Of course it´s a totally different cup of tea when it come to mixing and not track-laying but still, there must be a physical reason for this. I doubt that it has to so with hearing psychology. Maybe something with the relation between the listener-speaker-distance in relation to the room-size wich leads to higher direct sound while a large scale stage induced more indirect sound at the listener´s position wich makes program played at 85 seem WAY louder in a small room that in the large one.

Any fundamental info on this problem would be of interest for me.

Frank.