Most US music is now produced in residential, acoustically poor rooms

Evidence

After 1990 or so, although professional recording engineers had reached a consensus regarding the characteristics of a good mixing room, fewer and fewer such rooms were being built. The Pro Tools digital workstation had become the accepted standard for tracking, processing, and mixing recorded music. Almost every music composer and producer acquired a Pro Tools setup and proceeded to use it in the nearest convenient location. A spare bedroom became a professional music production room. If we include music composed for television and movies, the bulk of music produced in the U.S. today probably comes from residential studios. A major challenge for studio designers is how to make a small room acoustically acceptable for stereo monitoring and mixing. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 337

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to why room correction and accurate loudspeakers matter: the domestic listening-room chain now includes production, so translation failures accumulate.
• SEED: Potential angle: how democratization of production tools (Pro Tools) degraded the acoustic quality of the entire music creation chain, and what this implies for the consumer’s realistic expectation of recorded fidelity.