The control room is also very usefull in the “home” situation.
As an example: At my home I have two nice near field monitors, but as I am working in my living room you can imagine the treatment of that room leave an bit to desired (the well-known trade-off between room tratment and having an girfriend that has an bit of an resistance about turning an living room into an studio
).
So - I use an Acoustic Room Treatment system (IK ARC-2 plugin) on this spot to get some usable results (yes - I know, but for me it seems to work). This plugin is last in the chain, so its sits in the master (output) channel. So far nothing that needs the Control Room.
But, as you probably can imagine, working late at night has the problem you cannot use the monitors for obvious reasons. So, I need to work on an headphone. Feeding the “corrected” signal from the ARC plugin to an headphone is (very strongly) not advisable. Also - to keep results somewhat consitent I use an plugin from Toneboosters called TB-Isone. This plugin gives an “virtual” near-field monitor representation on your headphones.
So - this is where the Control Room is really usable. I can set up two seperate stereo output channels (I use an firewire connected Focusrite Saffire that has 6 outputs). One channel for the nearfield monitors with the ARC plugin in that channel, and one Headphone output channel with the TB-Isone plugin. The big advantage is that neither plugins have to be swiched off when you do the final mixdown, and you cannot make mistakes by switching on/off both plugins when you are using only one output cannel.
For me the Control Room is really extemely usable.