Bob Katz Mastering Room is Cool

Yikes! Sorry the room totally kills it for me Bob Katz or not.
Can a room like this even have a 'sweet spot'?

As far as the room, if you look at it as part of the monitor system it's all about knowing what is does right and wrong.
Also unless you been there you don't know what it sounds like.
As sir Bob says sounds good, and Mr Katz has never disappointed .

You been there ? 

Is it really just like a room in a house with a few panels on the wall ?


I'm not knocking his room , I think its cool how basic it is . Its actually inspired me to build my mixing room just like it . I can post pictures when I'm done . 

I did read some where he ditched the desk or table to avoid reflections . So he got a couch and wireless keyboard/mouse instead . 

Yes, I've been there. It's a good sounding room to begin with so it doesn't require much treatment. There's no need for isolation so there are few low frequency problems.

Yes - I can't tell from the few times in the video where the camera pans around the room.

He talks about his room a little bit here , 

I am sure Bob Katz knows what good monitoring is but he also knows people listen to music in living rooms. May he keeps some of the home flair?

Bob and I were both part of the first audio newsgroup started by Jim Johnston. That was followed by a mastering mailing list.

The internet was the only place we could learn anything about digital audio beyond Sony's PR and a few BS artists who regurgitated it in books and magazine articles because audio publication editors knew nothing about the subject. A lot of their mythology such as the idea of dither being optional lives on. I find the degree to which people will believe anything they read in a magazine or on the internet pretty frightening.

Vinyl is about the packaging as much or more than it is about the sound.

I think a sofa is very nifty in a mixing or mastering room. And i don't hear anything bad in the bass frequencies if i put a sofa in the room, not at all. But probably the opposite.
I saw Bob Katz in this room in previous videos and thought quite a bit about how he came to this...
But it fits the minimum impact philosophy perfectly IMO.
Most obviously he first listened to the room and only did the changes he thought were necessary to make it his working place. banning desks and avoiding console type comb filtering is something that obviously helped him to reach the goal.
If you start with like nothing, i.e. if you are going to build a mastering room from ground up, most people would do the room-in-room things and put a lot effort in building a room, that could stand everywhere and must not really take the rest of the house into account from an acoustical point of view. I mean, people even build new houses around their studio / mastering rooms, if they can afford it. This is very elaborate. And very expensive.
But it may result in very forseeable results, too, even if the location may be suboptimal.
But if the room already sounded very good from the start - why doing more than necessary to make it what he needs out of what is already there? And if he is comfortable working from he sofa, why not? Cool idea.
Isn't mastering minimalism to get things sound right?
I always see him doing his work very relaxed and calm, listening, thinking, and then trying the minimal impact correction. I guess this needs very high skills to work like this. And exceptionally trained, fresh and relaxed ears to hear what causes the problem. As we all know, affects, mood and constitution influence the hearing a lot, and i guess he tries to get a very consistent situation so these influences can be minimized and he stays fresh, very unstressed and open-minded.
The relaxed style of working obviously does not harm this at all and i am sure he is working very effective nevertheless, or, better, because of this...
Every time i see an interview with him, i do notice, how attentive and open he is. Many people of his age are much more introverted, bound to the past and tend to brood over things more and seem to have much less conscious perception. Heck, he is more awake than i am most of the time ... and quite a bit older!
So he obviously does some things very right.

Not really opposite because Bob L's room is much much larger which that photograph doesn't accurately portray. Bob K's idea was to get the console completely out of the picture. I love the Georgetown setup which has the console behind everybody.