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What do you make of the idea that you should mix to sound good the way your audience will listen to it?
by Cushman 14y ago
What do you make of the idea that you should mix to sound good the way your audience will listen to it?
- ScottWhigham 14y agoThat's a silly notion. You mix to sound good on all devices, not just one (headphones). A high quality and experienced mix engineer will spend sometimes years developing his/her ears and learning the room acoustics and learning their monitors' responses. This allows them to use 1-3 pairs of monitors in their studio that they know will "translate" (which means "that will sound good on any device"). Room acoustics and monitoring are a science, not an art, so this is easy stuff that anyone can do regardless of budget. Guys on a budget, however, will get one pair of monitors/headphones, do their mix, and go listen to that mix in lots of environments - cars, home stereos, beat boxes, etc. They'll hear how it sounds outside of the studio then they'll come back and make adjustments. This is how you "learn your monitors" - you are trying to learn about "500hz sounds too low in the studio but, if I bump up 500hz in the EQ, it sounds fine in the studio but then it gets muddy anywhere else". This is just how you do it.
- chipsy 14y agoI would like to point out that there is a lower limit to budget mixing, of course - when the equipment fails to translate any noticeable change, even if you're sweeping the parameter a great deal and listening carefully. At that point you have a problem.