Recording engineers are often charged with making recordings ’in-field’ that require artistic and creative judgements to made. Timbral fidelity, unlike per- ceived loudness or frequency response, is the least well understood and diffi- cult to control of perceptual characteristics. The long-term goal of this work is to provide a statistically valid ‘rule of thumb’ for the recording engineer wishing to achieve specific timbral characteristics in their location recordings, by evaluating a range...