if you rent out a "mixing room" to mix your song

how would you check if that mixing room is reliable as to what you're hearing in there?

 

With room acoustics measurements.

 

Renting a room to mix your song is actually almost worse than mixing in your untreated bedroom because you don't know the room. You should spend 2-3 days in the new room just listening to stuff to learn how music supposed to sound in there

 

You can also ask for references to see which bands have already worked there. You can usually tell from the company whether they are professionals or not. Check on the Internet what other users have to say about it. Check the result after the first recording or first day of recording.

 

Build yourself a set of reference tracks that you know how they should sound, it doesn't have to be perfectly mixed track, you can have some references that have something wrong with them so you can check if the room give you a proper image of the sound.

If you only use perfect mix references you can't see if the system give you an objective image or if it's just a good listening system (for exemple a not so great mix can sound good on a great hifi system but will never sound good on a proper studio system).

 

Open the sister and search for:
Groove3 Home Studio Know-How The Room And Acoustics
or
Read one of these books:
Room Acoustics by Heinrich Kuttruff
Acoustics of Small Rooms by Mendel Kleiner
or
Simply buy a headphone and forget the room like :
Slate VSX

 

Pay someone to mix the tracks for you. Compare them with the versions you do in a rented room, with rented reference monitors. If your versions are better, go play Powerball.