Control Room after the stereo bus or before the stereo bus?

Cubase
1

Hi,
I got a super basic question.
I am trying to use control room and kinda experimenting different setting but was wondering the signal path of control room.
if control room is enabled, what is the signal path order? like stereo out to control room or control room to stereo out?

2

After. The main mix bus is assigned as the outputs to the Control Room. processing you do on the Master Bus/Stereo Out of your mix will be displayed/recognised by the monitor signal chain.

Hence why its really useful to put monitoring tools like Supervision inserted on the Control Room bus so you can monitor everything at any time, post your master mix. This is also where I put something like Sonarworks Reference or ADPTR MetricAB and other reference tools.

It’s really useful even if you only have one stereo out and don’t need the various monitoring functions it’s ideally designed for. Any plugs put on the monitor mix here are project independent, so you can just set and forget, having those tools floating between projects by default. What you insert on here is not included in a mix bounce, it is for monitoring only. Hence its usefulness with stuff like Sonarworks (ie. no need to turn the plug off when bouncing).

Also if you don’t have an interface with a volume knob, hardware monitor controller, or other software volume control it’s useful for turning your monitoring up or down (ie. without actually effecting anything in the mix balance).

3 Likes
3

Thank you Atardecer!
I will keep changing settings for my workflow. Thank you again!

4

I agree with what you wrote in general, but just a nit-pick:

The main mix bus has output settings.
The Control Room has input / source settings.

It’s not that we set the main mix output to the Control Room, in fact it’s recommended that we set the main mix output to “not assigned” to avoid accidental doubling-up : Instead we set the source of Control Room to that main mix.

So it’s more like Control Room gets a “copy” of the main mix output. Just wanted to make that distinction so that people who read this don’t accidentally try to do this by changing the output of the main mix bus.

5

CONTROL ROOM - Signal Path (zoomed)
CONTROL ROOM - Signal Path (zoomed)832×1018 65 KB

6

The control room has both.
You can assign plugins to any configured CR input (sources) and you can assign plugins to the speaker systems (and the CUE outs and the phone out too).

It’s like a versatile monitoring matrix, and it’s independent of the mix.

7

I know. But that wasn’t the point I was getting at and it’s consistent with what I wrote.

(edit) Actually if you’re saying you can use plugins IN CR on an input source then ‘no’, I don’t think you can do that.

8

I didn’t want to say that you wrote inconsistent stuff.

At least on the cue mixes and the external ins.
Every cue mix and every external in has its own plugin set.