why does my mix sound totally different eleswhere?????

Hello,
This is a very common problem and it has to do with your room acoustics. I work in a home studio and mix off headphones for this very reason. I use the Audio Technica ATH-M50, which have been incredibly accurate and inexpensive. My mixes have translated incredibly well everywhere I've played them. I used to mix off an old Tascam pair of headphones and thought they sounded great on the them, but when I took them to the car or home stereo, they sounded terrible. When I brought these mixes up on the new Audio Technica headphones, I couldn't believe how much I had to compensate for the lack of bass on the Tascams. I had to remix everything and now they sound awesome. Check out www.acoustics101.com, if you are interested in treating your room. If you're looking for a cheaper, more accurate source, I highly recommend the Audio Technica ATH-M50. I've worked in the audio engineering industry for years, going through school for it. I wish I had started off with these headphones. Please remember not to turn up your mix too loud. This will cause your ear to fatigue and your mixes to sound different, as well. A good trick to use is to turn your mix down to where you can barely hear it. This will show you which of the instruments are up too loud and drowning out the other ones. Hope this helps.

I just wanted to jump in and second the above advice.

Room acoustics play the biggest part in mixed translating to multiple playback systems. Yet this is the one area most novices fail to spend any money or attention.

Your monitors are certainly good enough, but they can't work efficiently if the room you are mixing in is altering the sound coming from them.

Also, it's important to realize that mixing is as much as science, as it is an art, and can take many, many years to perfect.

I normally don't recommend mixing in headphones, but if you are really familiar with how they sound, and how things translate from them, it is an option.

Having a set of "cheap" speakers to check your mixes on can be a HUGE help as well. Most professional mix engineers carry around a set for this very reason. It allows you to hear your mix on a consumer type set-up, and you can quickly hear how your mix will hold up under those listening conditions. You don't necessarily mix the whole time using them, you just need to listen on them periodically through the day.

And definitely don't mix loud, Sure, every now and then, you can crank it up to get jazzed about things, but monitoring loud for extended periods will most definitely give you ear fatigue, and it's a guaranteed way to make sure your mixed DON'T translate outside of your studio. And the louder you monitor, the more those poor room acoustics come into play...

Firstly, monitoring can never be too good!

Secondly, If you think about it, all sound systems sound different. It is impossible by definition, to make a mix sound great on everything. The aim is to produce a mix that has a sound that works as good as the sound system it is being played on. It needs sound as one would expect. All obvious stuff but its easy to loose sight of this when scrutinizing your own work!

Your problem occurs because you are not taking into account the effect your mixing facility has on the sound. It may well be a case that it is impossible to take into account such effects - ie don't feel its your ear's fault!.

An example would be if your speakers emphasis the bass frequencies, then you will typically push up the treble part of the sound to make things sound right. The result will be a mix that has not enough bass and too much top-end.

As the previous poster points out, it could well be the acoustics of your room messing things up for you. Room acoustics can do very odd things to how you perceive the sound, and indeed this is an important area to consider and try to get right. But it really is only half the story.

Ideally you want a mix environment that allows you to hear everything in a perfectly transparent way: no emphasis or reduction on any frequency range and with the ability to play the full audio spectrum from 20Hz to 20kHz (some argue you should have even more.

Having said this such a facility is out of the range (financially or practically) for most people so its all about compromise. I know many folk who can produce fine mixes in the worst of environments - they simply "know" how a good mix sounds on their system and they work with that knowledge. Its not ideal of course but experience does count for a lot in this subject too.

If you want a tip to try with what you have, I would suggest you try creating a mix without using any EQ or compression or mastering whatsoever (the main area where mixes go wrong!) and just try to make it sound as good as you can just by balancing the levels. Have a listen to the result on different systems and it should help you to see how things "translate". You might also be surprised at how good it can sound doing things this way - I certainly was when I first tried it!

I just bought the Senheiser Pro HD 280 Headphones for this reason and am very pleased with them. I jam out on my monitors while creating the sounds in virtual instruments, then put the cans on for the mixdown.

Having said this such a facility is out of the range (financially or practically) for most people so its all about compromise. I know many folk who can produce fine mixes in the worst of environments - they simply "know" how a good mix sounds on their system and they work with that knowledge. Its not ideal of course but experience does count for a lot in this subject too.
If you want a tip to try with what you have, I would suggest you try creating a mix without using any EQ or compression or mastering whatsoever (the main area where mixes go wrong!) and just try to make it sound as good as you can just by balancing the levels. Have a listen to the result on different systems and it should help you to see how things "translate". You might also be surprised at how good it can sound doing things this way - I certainly was when I first tried it!

To expand on Thomas's thoughts...

He's right... making a room "perfect" is out of the financial realities for many people, but there are ways to get it into an acceptable range, without spending much money. The key is to educate yourself. There's LOTS of info floating around out there on this very subject.

And one thing I forgot to mention... you should be A/B-ing your mix with a professionally mastered CD, one that is in similar style to your own song and mix.

This will quickly allow you to "learn" your speakers, and get a sense of how things should sound on those monitors.

About 20 years ago I was mixing my first project, and I made a cassette copy of the mix, to listen to on my little boom box. It sounded absolutely horrible.

Since this project was being mastered by a mastering engineer in Nashville, I called him, frantically asking what went wrong. His first question to me was, "What does your favorite album sound like on that very boombox?"

Sure enough, once I played a commercial release in that boombox, and listened with the same "critical" ears, it sounded every bit as bad as my mix. I had never listened to it that way before, and I instantly learned what that boombox really sounded like.

If you mix enough, and compare or A/B enough with CD's that you like the sound of, you will quickly learn how your speakers sound, and be able to make mix decisions based on that knowledge.

But do treat your room to some degree. It really will make a significant difference.

All the above advice is great, and I'm going to add what I hope will be some information to it. You have at the moment one set of good monitors, and headphone mixes are always good as well, if not particularly accurate. Treat your room to a degree, as much as is economically feasible. Of course the nature of your house will make a big difference as well.

You also need to learn your monitors, which is why playing a professionally mastered CD of similar type of music will be helpful.

Also, most professional houses will have more than one set of monitors. One very useful thing is a cheap set of speakers, which will give you an idea of what it will sound like in a car or on a computer or television. The unfortunate reality is that most consumers listen to music in far less than ideal situations, and your mix will have to reflect that.

It's also a good idea to have a second set of monitors of a different strength than your first, if possible. Between the cheap speakers, a couple of good sets of monitors, and headphones, you should get a good idea of what your mix will sound like in a variety of situations.

At that point, listen to it in a variety of situation, which is what you've been doing anyway. Any surprises will be revealed at that point.

And at school they always tell us to slowly turn the volume all the way down, and listen to what is the last sound to be heard before the song disappears entirely. That, then, is your loudest and likely most prominent sound. So if the last thing you were to hear would be the bass, say, and the singer were to be a man in the baritone range, it would be likely that the two would be in conflict somewhere.

And once you know that, you can adjust the mix, and the placement of things in the mix, accordingly. Hope any of this was helpful!

Well here are my few cents worth.

I am a hobbyist composer and have been an "audiophile" for a zillion years. My wife and I go to quite a few live performances here in Monterey.

In my opinion good headphones (and I mean good - like sennheisers, grados, etc) will always give u more detail than speakers (unless u can afford expensive ones) simply because they eliminate room acoustics and are closely coupled to the ear. They can also have good neutrality, but cannot generate the bass or dynamics of good speakers.

I mix my music on headphones and listen to it primarily on headphones. I can sometimes small differences between what it sounded like within Logic and after bouncing it. Hard to describe, but the bounce to my ears is not a completely what I hear within the program Very close though. Not sure why this would be the case.

Going to speakers makes a larger difference, not just due to the room acoustics but also due to the quality of the speakers themselves.

Whenever we go to a live concert the biggest differences (versus reproduced music) we hear are the live dynamics, sense of ease, and transparency. This is true for all types of music. It was even tru at the Monterey Jazz festival, where many of the performances are outside (no room!).

I used to own a pair of $13,000 a pair Avant Garde Unos, and they had the dynamic capability to sometimes give a true sense of "being there". They sounded better than my headphones due to their greater dynamics, and better and much deeper bass. But most people don't have speakers even close to being that good.

After getting married and moving into my wife's house we no longer have the space for them. I currently own a pair of good conventional speakers (Operas) and they have good detail and neutrality but cannot reproduce the dynamics and bass of the horns.

What I am saying here is that, for me, the one factor that makes the most difference (far greater than anything else, including the room) is the quality of the speakers.

My guess is that your stereo speakers are not all that great (what are they?), and do what many poor speakers do: they accentuate the bass and mids to give what many people find a more "exciting" sound, but they are not transparent or accurate. For playing music that is mostly loud and distorted (and there is a lot of "music" like that nowadays) they might do OK, but they are not capable of reproducing true music correctly.

I could be wrong, but it appears like that too me. NOTHING AFFECTS THE SOUND OF A MUSIC SYSTEM MORE THAN THE SPEAKERS. NOTHING. Not the electronics (as long as they are decent), not the cables, not even the room (unless it is really bad). Good speakers will ALWAYS sound better than poor ones, even in a not so ideal room. ALWAYS!

Also it is clear that the trend is away from quality reproduction of music amongst the masses.

Why are CD sales declining, and compressed files from the Internet on the rise. listened over portable devices with often horrible headphones, etc. But I digress.

So my opinion is not that u need better monitors (use headphones) but that u need better speakers for your stereo.

Just my opinion. What are your stereo speakers anyway?

And if u compromise your sound to match the **** speakers most people use it will suffer.

🙂

Wow. Well, . . . now you've all done such a great job convincing the original poster that his room, monitors and living room stereo are total shyte . . . .

Maybe the guy just doesn't have any mixing skills yet?

Well, here's the truth of the matter - nothing you hear on the radio or buy in the store was mixed on headphones. No pair of headphones is going to give you more detail than a good pair of studio monitors. Headphones give you grossly inaccurate bass frequency response because bass frequencies take a certain amount of space to develop. With a set of headphones on, you're usually giving your bass frequencies less than an inch to develop. You'll end up mixing bass very loud and the upper harmonics of the bass frequencies that permeate the rest of the spectrum will throw off the entire mix. Headphones in the professional sense are usually used for monitoring and for checking stereo image. Eliminating the room is not necessarily what you want to do.

When you eliminate the room, you get an unrealistic mix that won't translate to much of anything well. Its like having a completely dead room - with no reflections whatsoever, you end up cranking up the mix very loud and getting ear fatigue. By balancing the reflections, you create a room that gives you an accurate mix.

Knowing what your speakers sound like helps too. You can get a great mix with the crappiest of speakers if you know what you are listening for. Listen to songs you know VERY well on your speakers, and try to emulate that sound in your mix. The quality of the speakers is great - but a great mix can be had on crap, just look at the NS-10's. Those things suck. But they suck so much that if you can get your stuff to sound good on those, your mix really will sound good everywhere else.

Its all about room acoustics, bass reproduction, and knowing what your speakers sound like. . . and knowing how to mix helps too. Mixing on headphones is never recommended.

You make some valid and interesting points MafMusic but I feel you are not quite grasping the differences between the two processes of listening to music for pleasure and creating a good mix. If the room is bad then it really doesn't matter how good your speakers are. This is a bit different for hi-fi.

Allow me to expand (and I don't mean to be patronizing in any way). Our hearing is a complex process with lots of processing going on in the brain. We have a fantastic ability to hear through noise, for example, and we can use other references to "fill in the gaps". We can perceive sound to have lots of bass due to the nature of upper frequencies for eg. The thing is, we can still enjoy listening to a recording even though there is a major lift at 300Hz due to room acoustics and indeed our ears (or rather, brain!) go some way to compensate for this.

Its a bit like the way we see colour. We still perceive green as green in orange-y tungsten light like we have some sort of "white balance" going on in our eyes - take a picture with film, without a flash and colour looks very different!

In the studio we have a job to do, we have to make judgments and make changes to sounds. Unless we know exactly what effect the room (or indeed our speakers) is having on our recordings we cannot make accurate assessments. And its very hard to know what the room is doing to our sound - or indeed how we should compensate if we did know.

I'm sorry, but good speakers are certainly required but they are a long way from being the sole solution to bad mixes.

Average speakers in an average room is better than great speakers in a bad room.

Headphones can really help in less-than-ideal spaces (I use them a lot myself) but even the best get tiring after a while and that in itself messes with our ability to make sound judgement (sic).

old powerbook g4 airport help welcome to the forum, and Sorry to hear your mix's are coming out like that,


this only means your now closer in getting that spot on mix, after the research you have done,

by listening to your song on other Media such as a out door system/Car Stereo and so forth.

So here is the next step!

What you heard on the other media is the true Mix and what you hear on your set-up is Fake!

Why is this?

Your Room isn't tune, as a mastering room, therefore listening to your Motu and Event 20 20 isn't enough in Tracking and getting a Detail mix!

So here is a trick that can solve this get yourself a pair of Nearfield Monitor,

M1 Active 520 Nearfield monitor is great in achieving this?


Why i recommend the 520 is because its spot on, and even if your blind when set-up properly if your Mix is too hot! Peaking and all.


1 there is a light on top of the speakers which is blue and if it start flashing a different color light after you have set it in hearing the true reflection of your room than it was before,

therefore you now know your permitter of your mix's.

2 on the back of the Alesis 520 there are four switch in setting the Frequency of what your room is giving you Acoustic-Space High-Bost Mid-Bost a Low and also a Gain,

if and when you crack this setting to suite your room in Mixing it means even if you even mix $hit it comes out Honey.

I've used the 20 20 its okay but if its your only use for tracking when mixing it will be very much off,

worst if your not using a Analogue Mixing desk or some type of summing device that will sweep the Frequency you really want to hear it won't be the same,

as the 20 20 can't give you the Clarity that you'll expect to get when tracking,

i find them to be to a bit Grannie or Bass-ie if you know what i mean, Hiding the precise detail of the true-tone which i called the Wolf-Tone,

however it sounds real good when pumping the overall mix when finish.

Also try and do a match of other mix on CD of the style of Music that your doing meaning songs you know from time as how it would sounds on other Media, and try matching it with your set-up in the way you hear it.

Please note mixing in Logic-Pro or any Daw will not give you the Precise sound of a properly Mastered song but can get very close, and even better after it has been mastered.


Also on your Motu Sound-Card i believe there is a switch that switches more and less bass try fiddling with it that might well be a part of the answer as why it sound like a 5 year old play with your mix.

Also take into consideration when mixing with Motu Sound-Card it will also make your mix a bit colorful on the Tops, Motu is know for that.






Fr.BlayZay.

<<Headphones give you grossly inaccurate bass frequency response because bass frequencies take a certain amount of space to develop. With a set of headphones on, you're usually giving your bass frequencies less than an inch to develop.>>

I'm not arguing with your dislike for headphones for mixing exactly (or other points you make) but I'm not sure about the "science" you wrote there! If I have my head in a bass-bin I wont hear bass?? There are implications regarding bass and the size of the room but it does not apply in the same way to headphones. Indeed there are many implications with headphone freq. response - but this "space for bass to develop" stuff is the stuff of hi-fi magazines (heck I'm really stirring the pot there aren't I!)

Ns10's are an interesting phenomena. I certainly do not subscribe to the idea that if you can make a mix sound good on bad speakers then it will sound good on anything. That is clearly preposterous. I've heard this said before and its misleading, especially to those learning.

I don't know why, NS10's got so popular - or why they worked so well for so many. I have one theory that they had such a strong characteristic sound that it was very easy to learn it - and compensate accordingly. They had very little low end too so it meant the room didn't matter as much. And of course - they were in every studio so if you couldn't work with them you wouldn't work! Good riddance to them I say!

🙂

Well each to his own. 🙂

I completely agree about the bass issue in headphones: I so stated that in my letter.
And I am sure that most music is not mixed on headphones (I am not a pro, just a hobbyist, so I do not have a clue about that, and don't pretend to.

But I completely stand by my statement regarding detail and nuance. The diaphragm in good headphones are light and have good transient attack. And they don't have to work against the room. So there can be less coloration.

But people can certainly disagree here. That has just been my own observation (and many others as well).

Since I am a hobbyist I only mix for me and some of my friends: and what sounds good over my headphones (a pair of good Grado's) sounds pretty darn good on good speakers as well. The speakers will have better bass and more realistic imaging and better dynamics. Usually the headphones will provide better detail and transparency. But I am a hobbyist not a pro,

Good headphones should reproduce the acoustic space of the performance to a fair extent: depends on how well the diaphragms and chambers are designed. But speakers with good spatial reproduction and imaging will definitely do much much better in that area, no question. And as I stated they will never beat good speakers on bass. I was referring to detail and transparency primarily.

So I mostly agree with LogicalAnalysis regarding headphones.

As far as mixing for terrible speakers, that argument just doesn't wash to me. It doesn't make sense at face value.

Think about it.

Let's assume that the monitoring speakers have a large bass increase in their frequency response. You would compensate by reducing the base in your mix (at least I think that is what you would do). So if you played the same music on a pair of truly flat speakers the bass would sound anemic. Unless I am really missing something here.

If u mix based on poor speakers then the music will sound better on poor speakers. I remain to be convinced otherwise, logically and in reality.

Or if the speakers have poor transient response then u will compensate by using all kinds of corrections, like compression, exciters, whatever. If u play that compensated music on good speakers it will sound artificial and over compensated.

Of course the type of music will weigh heavily here. I listen primarily to classical, jazz, folk, electronic (experimental) and classic rock primarily. On heavy metal, which is mostly distortion, then hey who cares!

If u recall the days when top notch super quality CDs were being made by companies like Telarc, In their advertisements they always stressed that they mixed on top notch, neutral speakers with good electronics. They never said "we mix on bad speakers to make this music sound better on crappy speakers like yours!" LOL

You will always match the least common denominator. There is no way that tweaking a music file to sound good on lousy speaker will make it sound better on good speakers. It will sound good on the least common denominator, which is what most people own.

MF

Maybe the guy just doesn't have any mixing skills yet?

Well, there's certainly that... 🙂

Let me just say, the whole thing about mixing on mediocre speakers and having it translate is entirely possible, IF, and this is the KEY thing, IF you know what they truly sound like, and how songs you know intimately translate on them.

Without that point of reference, that theory doesn't hold up. But with that point of reference, you get the NS-10 phenomenon.

I own NS-10's, and I power them with a McIntosh 2100 solid state power amp. With that kind of power supplied to them, they actually sound quite good.

I use them as a second set, to my Dynaudio BM6's, which are my "main" monitors. I also use a pair of Avatone Mix Cubes, which simulate the computer/television speaker world.

The key to all of this is having a point of reference, and knowing the speakers your listening to, as well as what room aspects to watch out for.

Thomas:

Thanks for the articulate and interesting reply.

What u state certainly makes total sense: I am mostly a listener, not a mixer! LOL In fact, only over the past few months have I started to have confidence in my ability to mix my music (like I said I am a hobbyist). I know it is a special art and science, and many people make a living doing just that. I have been composing for years, and did a very poor job of mixing over most of that period.

I am totally aware of the psychoacoustic effects u mention. In part, fletcher-munson and all that cool stuff. Masking, spatial recreation, etc. Fascinating.

I have been under the impression that near field monitors are designed to minimize room effects. Is that true? They are "near field" because they minimize the effects of the reverberant field, which accounts for most aspects of imaging, etc. In many respects that is what headphones do, and to me they have more detail than the near field monitors I won (to remain unnamed 🙂. yeah they can get tiring to wear (good comfortable headphones are grados, akgs, and some others).

It certainly makes sense that good speakers are not the total solutioon, and room effects should be in the equation.

For pros it would be great to have an official studion where u can create a more ideal room. No question.

But nowadays tons of people like myself are writing stuff and do not have the luxury to have their stuff mixed in a studio or modify their own spaces.

I find that mixing on good phones gives me results that sound good on good speakers: that is just me. And I still think that the issues from the original poster were due to his speakers (at least it sounds like it).

As far as "average speakers in average rooms sounding better than great speakers in a bad room".
Perhaps a lot of the time.

But it depends on how "great" is great!

I have owned some really good speakers in small not so great apartments (some really bad) in my life and they sounded pretty darned good, sometimes really really good.:-) Especially bipolar radiators like electrostatics and magneplanars. Just my opinion.

This is a fascinating ares of discussion for me. thanks for listening.