Flattening the room response 347 when wishing to work in the close field, a person is effectively requesting to work in a room with a decay time that is shorter than the nominal decay time in the room in which they are working. The practice of requesting a given room decay time (RT 60 , T 60 ), rejecting the main monitors as being too affec- ted by the room, and then electing to work in the close field, is a triumph of ignorance over acoustics. The answer could seem to lie in reducing the room decay time for the large monitoring systems; then, if the room were deemed oppressive, increasing the reflected energy from the speech and actions of the people working within the room by means of surfaces out of the line of sight of the loudspeakers. Now we are finally beginning to touch upon the subject of control room design. 12.8 Summary The control of a room, to flatten the transfer function from loudspeaker to ear, is best achieved acoustically. In the case of mono, the loudspeaker and listening positions can be adjusted to find a best compromise response, but this is more difficult in stereo, where a triangular geometry between two loudspeakers and the listener must be maintained. Monitor equalisation is not an answer, but perversely it is usually the studios with the least acoustic treatment ­ the ones least able to be corrected by equalisation ­ that are the ones where it is currently most likely to be found in