An abbreviation for Live End/Dead End, this is a studio design technique that combines a "live" (reflective or diffuse) area in the rear of the room and a "dead" (highly absorptive) area at the front of the control room, surrounding the speakers.
Live End Dead End (TM). A style of recording control room design in which, among other things, the front half of the room is acoustically 'dead' - without strong reflections - and the rear half is reflective and diffusive. Conceived in the days of two-channel stereo, and loudspeakers with problematic directivity, the relevance to multichannel audio is questionable.
Live-End-Dead-End room. A room designed to attenuate speaker reflections from adjacent walls, while highlighting the more delayed, scattered reflections from the far end, behind the listeners. This keeps the recorded signals from being strongly modified by the front of the listening room and allows the longer delays from the rear to place room-generated ambience where it belongs. An LEDE room will be heavily padded at the speaker end and lined with diffusing panels at the other end. The absorptive characteristics of this room may result in recordings that are overly bright when played back on wide-dispersion speaker systems located in typical, somewhat more reflective, home-listening rooms.