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In the Subaru. Mixing music is very, very difficult. You have to deal with the inaccuracy of your equipment, the inaccuracy of your ears, and the ability to dr

by beat 9y ago

In the Subaru. Mixing music is very, very difficult. You have to deal with the inaccuracy of your equipment, the inaccuracy of your ears, and the ability to drift into boiled-frog mode, making something terrible that sounds good to you because you got here gradually. Another kind of related tool I use extensively while mixing is reference recordings - listening to someone else's music on the same system, in alternation with what I'm mixing, to make sure I'm not boiling my frog. But yes, listening to other reproduction systems - especially bad ones, like my Subaru speakers and older iPod earbuds - is critical. It helps me insure that what sounds good on my multi-thousand $$ studio monitors in a decent room sounds good everywhere else, too.

derefr 9y ago
Another question: if it comes down to a choice of making something sound worse on consumer hardware, vs. sounding worse on studio hardware, you'll favor the consumer listening experience at the expense of the monitor output, right? So, does this mean that it's a bad idea to use studio-grade equipment for personal listening of commercially-released (and so, presumably, mastered for consumer equipment) tracks? And, if so, are alternate mixes of the same tracks that are sometimes released any better? A "club mix", for example (assuming you don't care about the changes to the track itself)? And, one more question—given that mastering somewhat distorts the pre-master for a particular listening profile... is there any way for someone who wants to sample a track in their own production, to get access to the pre-master copy of the track they want to sample from, so they don't "accumulate mastering artifacts" the way that JPEG-recompression accumulates compression artifacts? I've seen, every once in a while, a band that has a "remix competition" release e.g. a Garage-band project with all the raw tracks embedded. Is it common to make a deal with a producer to get access to something like this on a one-off basis? Is it even technically feasible, or is pre-master track data lost/discarded after completion of mastering often enough that such requests don't make sense? (Sorry, I never realized there were so many of these questions on my mind. Is there a sound-engineer Quora?)
- beat 9y ago
  Listen on whatever you like! I feel it's the mix/master engineers' jobs to create a final-product recording that sounds good in as many different environments as possible. Just my opinion, of course, and there are certainly recordings that will only sound good on fine hi-fi gear. I like to think of a recording as a miniature of a real-world musical experience. I love cranking up my old Mesa Mark I guitar amp to the threshold of pain and wailing on it. It's an amazing sonic experience. But I cannot reproduce that sound on a pair of $20 Skullcandy earbuds. So instead of going for accuracy of reproduction, I'm trying to reproduce the feel, the vibe. Kind of like how a painting represents a landscape differently than a photograph, and neither really represents the landscape well. I'll take the painting, when it's truer to the feeling of the landscape. This can be seen in dynamic range. Human hearing has tremendous dynamic range, and live acoustic instruments do as well. But your average modern record has no more than 20db, probably far less (often less than 6db). The "loudness war" of RMS vs peak volume is at play here, but more importantly, it plays to the dynamic weakness of consumer audio gear. Less dynamic range sounds "better", up to a point. You don't want to listen to un-mastered mixes. You really don't.

by beat 9y ago

derefr 9y ago

Another question: if it comes down to a choice of making something sound worse on consumer hardware, vs. sounding worse on studio hardware, you'll favor the consumer listening experience at the expense of the monitor output, right? So, does this mean that it's a bad idea to use studio-grade equipment for personal listening of commercially-released (and so, presumably, mastered for consumer equipment) tracks? And, if so, are alternate mixes of the same tracks that are sometimes released any better? A "club mix", for example (assuming you don't care about the changes to the track itself)? And, one more question—given that mastering somewhat distorts the pre-master for a particular listening profile... is there any way for someone who wants to sample a track in their own production, to get access to the pre-master copy of the track they want to sample from, so they don't "accumulate mastering artifacts" the way that JPEG-recompression accumulates compression artifacts? I've seen, every once in a while, a band that has a "remix competition" release e.g. a Garage-band project with all the raw tracks embedded. Is it common to make a deal with a producer to get access to something like this on a one-off basis? Is it even technically feasible, or is pre-master track data lost/discarded after completion of mastering often enough that such requests don't make sense? (Sorry, I never realized there were so many of these questions on my mind. Is there a sound-engineer Quora?)

beat 9y ago
Listen on whatever you like! I feel it's the mix/master engineers' jobs to create a final-product recording that sounds good in as many different environments as possible. Just my opinion, of course, and there are certainly recordings that will only sound good on fine hi-fi gear. I like to think of a recording as a miniature of a real-world musical experience. I love cranking up my old Mesa Mark I guitar amp to the threshold of pain and wailing on it. It's an amazing sonic experience. But I cannot reproduce that sound on a pair of $20 Skullcandy earbuds. So instead of going for accuracy of reproduction, I'm trying to reproduce the feel, the vibe. Kind of like how a painting represents a landscape differently than a photograph, and neither really represents the landscape well. I'll take the painting, when it's truer to the feeling of the landscape. This can be seen in dynamic range. Human hearing has tremendous dynamic range, and live acoustic instruments do as well. But your average modern record has no more than 20db, probably far less (often less than 6db). The "loudness war" of RMS vs peak volume is at play here, but more importantly, it plays to the dynamic weakness of consumer audio gear. Less dynamic range sounds "better", up to a point. You don't want to listen to un-mastered mixes. You really don't.