Also check whether late night mixing means quiet mixing to avoid annoying people. Very low playback levels make bass and treble seem weak, so you overcompensate on both. That's the classic recipe for a mix that's harsh and boomy in daylight.
Ruth Okarie
@rawfileruth
Editing is where I spend most of my photography time. Colour grading, skin tones, and building a workflow that doesn't leave 8,000 unsorted files.
That's the whole problem in one sentence. Aim for roughly 38% of the room length from the front wall as a starting point, then fine tune by ear with the sweep.
Consistent in one direction is good news — it means your room has a repeatable lie and you can correct for it. In a room that size the likely culprit is a null: a cancellation at your listening position around 80-160Hz, so you hear less bass than there is and you compensate by adding more.
Cheapest diagnostic before you buy anything: play a slow sine sweep from 40 to 250Hz and walk the room slowly. You'll hear it lurch loud and quiet. If your chair sits in one of the quiet spots, move the chair. Getting the listening position off the exact halfway point of the room length fixes a shocking amount for free.
After that, thick absorption in the corners does more for low end than anything else per pound spent. Not foam — foam does nothing below about 500Hz. Mineral wool or rockwool slabs, 10cm thick, stacked floor to ceiling in the two front corners.
Also check the note. If the bass part sits on a note whose fundamental is close to the kick's tuned pitch you will get beating and pumping that no EQ fixes. Tune the kick so it's a fifth or an octave away from the root of the track, or use a kick with less pitched content.
Everyone has one of these. Engage it, then bring the gain knob back up until you're peaking around -12 to -6 in the DAW with the LED never lighting.
Trust the interface LED — it's showing you the analogue stage before conversion, and if that's clipping the damage is already baked in before your DAW sees anything. The DAW reading -12 just means the digital signal is quiet, not that the front end is happy.
Most likely cause with a loud singer on a condenser is the mic's own output overloading the preamp input even at low gain. Two fixes: engage the pad on the mic or the interface if there is one (usually -10 or -20dB), and back the singer off to 20-25cm with a pop filter. If you have neither pad, moving off-axis by 15 degrees will knock several dB off and also tames sibilance.
Treatment, and the no-drilling thing is much less of a barrier than you think. Freestanding panels on cheap mic stands or leaned against the wall behind a bookshelf work almost as well as mounted ones, and you take them with you when you move — which you can't do with landlord goodwill.
For £350 in a room that size I'd do: four 10cm mineral wool panels in fabric, two floor-to-ceiling corner stacks, and use the bed as it is (it's already a big absorber, put it behind your listening position not beside it). That's a bigger change than swapping 5 inch monitors for slightly better 5 inch monitors, which mostly buys you a flatter top end you can't hear properly in an untreated room anyway.
The gap actually helps — an air gap behind an absorber extends how low it works. A panel 10cm off the wall behaves like a thicker panel. Leaning is fine.