If you live in an apartment or shared living quarters:

- You're going to want to use headphone monitors a lot of the time. Home-Studio-Recording.com recommends the Sony MDR7506 headphones because they last for years, and they're the most affordable and accurate headphone monitors on the market. High-end recording studios everywhere across the country use these; they're simply the best in their price range.

- You're going to need some level of soundproofing if you're setting up a home recording studio in an apartment where either your neighbors are loud, or you plan on recording acoustic drum tracks or blaring guitar amps. If you're using an electric drum kit or synthesized drums, you may be able to get away without doing any soundproofing, unless of course you have loud neighbors, or if you're using a home recording studio setup where you can't patch your electric instruments right into the recording hardware interface.

If you live in the city:

- All of the above applies to you for your home recording studio, plus additional considerations. Obviously noise levels vary greatly depending on where you live, but generally the odds are really not in your favor for a home recording studio in the city because there are just so many things you typically have to deal with: car horns, buses, subway noise, fire engines, police sirens, noisy streets, noisy neighbors... the list goes on and on. You're going to want some level of soundproofing if you live in the heart of a city, especially if you're going to have a home recording studio in an apartment.

Problems with having a home recording studio or noise in your surrounding area aren't just restricted to city living though. If you live in a suburb, but you're right under the local flight path, it can interfere with all of your acoustic recording setups, in addition to making anything sitting on the floors or up against the walls vibrate somewhat. (For this particular problem, you'll want acoustical foam pads that can be placed underneath your monitors--if you have them--and underneath anything that has potential to rattle under the intense vibrations of outer sounds.)

You may also be located right next to a highway, in which case you're probably quite used to hearing that constant sound of fast traffic whizzing by at 50 or 60 mph. Traffic at this speed doesn't make "noise;" it creates this constant sound of what can only be described as ocean waves in the distance. If you've lived next to a highway for awhile, you probably don't even notice this ocean type sound anymore because you're so used to it. However, other people will hear it and notice it if your windows or walls aren't properly treated for soundproofing, because it will show up in your mixes, however subtle it is.

Do you have double panel storm windows? (This will largely depend on how old your house is, or how recently you've had your windows replaced.) If you don't have storm windows, you already have a couple strikes against you for setting up a home recording studio if you don't live in a completely quiet neighborhood. This question obviously only applies to the room you're doing your doing home recording in, so if you're not recording in a room that has windows, this obviously isn't a factor for you.

Wallpaper or wood panels? Are your floors wood, carpeted, or tiled? There's a couple reasons to factor all this into your home recording studio setup. Although most people think that having a home recording studio in a room with nice acoustics is best, this is not always the case. If you're recording vocals, and you have wood floors or wood paneling on the walls, it will create a subtle (but existent) flutter in sound from one area of the room to another- from your floors and ceiling, to opposing sides of each wall. Sometimes the flutter, or "bounce," is not so subtle, depending on the angularity of the room your using for recording at home. (Parallel angles maximize this problem oftentimes.) This is one of the most frustrating problems you'll deal with when it comes time to mix your tracks. Those tiny little flutters that seemed so subtle when you were recording your tracks suddenly become magnified when you realize that all of your acoustic tracks or vocals have flutters in the background. When you go to layer effects like reverb or sound processing over some of these tracks, their effectiveness will be thrown somewhat because of the original recording integrity of the track.