2 Apr
2010
2 Apr
'10
9:05 p.m.
On Thu, Apr 01, 2010 at 05:01:30PM -0700, Ken Restivo wrote:
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 09:44:20PM +0200,
fons(a)kokkinizita.net wrote:
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.
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 02:38:29PM -0400, Paul
Davis wrote:
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. 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.
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 !