On Thu, Apr 01, 2010 at 05:01:30PM -0700, Ken Restivo wrote: > On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 09:44:20PM +0200, fons@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 02:38:29PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: > > > > > you simply can't be making this kind of assumption, i claim. a good > > > mastering job makes sure that it sounds OK on *all* likely listening > > > systems. > > > > According to my supervisor at the time I was doing mixes > > all days, it was *my* job to ensure things sounded well > > on all kind of systems and at all levels. And doing it > > while mixing gives you a lot more freedom to do it right > > than trying to 'fix' a stereo signal. > > > > Well a friend was kind enough to lend me his expensive studio monitors (Fostex PM-2), and, listening to my mixes on them, they sound like ass. Sure enough, there are tons of problems in the high-midrange region that my crappy headphones and Cambridge SoundWorks home stereo just were not turning up. So I've been spending the last few days re-EQ'ing, re-compressing, and re-leveling. Mixing on headphones is *really* one thing to be avoided. I'll do it only if there's no 'mixing' at all involved, e.g. recording classical music with just a stereo pair, and even then it can give you a completely shifted picture. Most home systems are designed to be flattering rather than revealing, that makes them sell, so mixing on those is a bad idea as well. > If I had enormous amounts of money laying around, I'd probably invest in some Ultrasone headphones and some KRK monitors. Forget the headphones. Put your money into a pair of good small near-field monitors, and learn to mix on those. Regarding the more general mastering issue, you can make a recording sound acceptable on a cheap car radio, and maybe there are reasons to do that, but it will be a compromise. The result will be that it doesn't sound as well as it could on a decent system. My usual approach was to mix on a pair of quite small near- field boxes, occasionaly check for problems on the big studio monitors, but keep focussed on the small ones. When those sounded right, record it. Then switch to the big ones, and of course that would sound spectacular. And then, if there was some time left, improve the mix on those by undoing the things done to make the mix work on the cheap boxes. The result would be a sound that was *less* spectacular, but in the long term, just better. Ciao, -- FA O tu, che porte, correndo si ? E guerra e morte ! _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
