Monitoring discipline, hearing health, and the small tools that quietly make studio work easier. New posts irregularly, when there's something worth saying.
Hearing health
A 2026 meta-analysis of 28,000+ musicians pooled across 67 studies puts hard numbers on what the audiology community has been quietly saying for decades. None of the old excuses survive — including the genre one.
Workflow
A pink-noise sweep, a name, and one keystroke replace fifteen years of guessing what "Mix" actually means in dB SPL. The new integration in Auris 1.2 and Lyra 1.4 closes the gap between SPL meter and monitor controller.
Hearing health
Every 3 dB increase halves your safe listening time. Every 3 dB decrease doubles it. The arithmetic is unforgiving and most engineers have never run it on their own habits.
Practice
Translation, consistency, lower hearing dose, less fatigue. The case for calibrated monitoring has been made for fifty years; the tooling finally caught up.