Ableton Forum

Hi,

I would love to hear some tips from more experienced musicians on an issue that I regularly come up against:

I have some Edirol Powered Monitors and some AKG 240 DF Headphones. Neither are studio monitor quality, but I think I would have the same issue regardless.

I create a mix using my speakers and the headphones and I get it to a point that sounds good on both. Then I listen on some sennheiser phones at work which emphasise bass, and there is sub-bass in the mix that will take your head off (and not in a good way). Then on the way home, iPod headphones show some edgey/toppiness to the vocals that are unpleasant.

So my question is: How can I get the mix better before I leave my home-studio. I would expect a bit of tweaking after testing on real-world equipment, but I'm way off, and since these problems are not evident on the studio setup, it's pretty hard to 'mix' it out. I understand that decent reference monitors are often recommended, and do not overemphasise any frequencies, but would they have shown up the rumbling bass problem, or toppy vocals?

Thanks for any pointers here.


Nick

a really general advice that obviously does not suit everyone would be to cut everything below 30Hz and shelve down 16-20kHz area, or even cut at 18kHz as higher frequencies tend to introduce artifacts during conversion to mp3 and lala

Good advice but also shows the importance of listening to your mix on as many different formats as possible. I tend to check in the car too!

Sounds to me like you need to invest in better monitor speakers and better cans.

If you can hear the low bass on the Sennies, they would be a good starting point.

Take the head removing mix to a store and play it on various monitors there. See which ones reproduce it.

If none do, you need to look at adding a sub.

^^
in an untreated room sub will introduce more problems than clarification.
you don't really have to invest in proper monitoring in that situation either.
just get to know your current speakers well - listen to music on them, compare your mixes with professional ones