Blind room exchange

On 14 March 2018, Diverse Studio began moving a six-part concert recording between two control rooms after each completed mix. The engineer entering the Ornella Room received only a numbered audio export from the Vanoni Room, and the operator in Vanoni received the next export under the same conditions. Neither room was given the other operator’s notes.

Procedure

The exchange was designed for immersive productions using the studio’s Dolby Atmos array. Each operator could adjust balance, movement and apparent distance, but could not reopen the preceding session. Changes therefore accumulated in a new project file rather than being reconciled with an agreed master.

The studio manager described the practice as a means of separating spatial audio decisions from professional deference. Later accounts by the operators instead present it as a scheduling measure adopted when both rooms had been booked to different clients. No surviving timetable establishes which explanation came first.

Review copies were delivered as gifts through private download links and were commonly saved in the engineers’ personal collections. Two operators also placed unfinished versions on their wishlists as reminders to request access. This practice made the files easy to retrieve but detached them from the studio’s internal version numbering.

Version drift

Three projects passed through the exchange. On the second, the final six sections exhibited Cumulative transposition, although the pitch change was absent from the first export. The fault was initially attributed to a monitoring difference between the rooms. A later comparison showed that it had been written into the successive files.

Other changes were less conspicuous. Ambience shifted upward between versions, solo passages moved toward the rear channels, and one percussion part alternated between a fixed position and a circular path. Because no operator heard every intermediate state, the approved master did not correspond to a version that any participant remembered reviewing in full.

Credits dispute

The release agreement provided a single mix engineer credit, while the session history named four operators and two assistants. Diverse Studio assigned the credit to the person who created the delivery master. The other operators argued that this described file preparation rather than authorship, since most immersive choices had entered during earlier exchanges.

Subsequent editions used collective credits for the studio but did not identify individual contributions. The procedure was discontinued after the third project. It remains unclear whether blind exchange was intended as a formal listening experiment or was retrospectively presented as one after an improvised workflow produced an acceptable master.

See also

• Grey reference case — Diverse Studio
• In defence of cumulative transposition — Cumulative transposition
• Le tour du terrain — Cumulative transposition
• Mirror unit — Cumulative transposition
• Piatkový výber — Cumulative transposition
• Sound reproduction consultant (Le Puid) — Cumulative transposition
• The routes exist — Cumulative transposition