While you might have recorded everything direct and "in the box", you are listening in a room.

The room you listen in will affect what you hear. As a result, what started as line level quickly morphs into the results of the room's acoustic characteristics. Is the room live or dead or somewhere in between? Are there nulls or hot-spots and at what frequencies....AND... are they occurring at the place where you are setting to do your mixing? All of that and more affect the mix you make in that room. Any time you put sound into a space, there are reflections and the sound waves will be in and out of phase depending on the frequency, and the location and the reflectivity or absorption of the surfaces.

This can result in mixes that are so far off, it's not even funny. Rooms should be tested and treated if you really want to get consistently good results with your mixes.

Using a transistor radio to check a mix is fine, but using the cheapest speakers possible to mix and thinking you're going to get superb mixes every time as a result is just wrong thinking. If, no, let me correct that right here..... the cheap speakers WILL have a bias...lets say they have a poor low end response and a rolled off high end response due to small cones and cheap or no tweeters, you will produce mixes that tend to be bass heavy and brittle on the high end when played on a decent consumer system. Now, factor in what the room does to the sound and you generally end up "chasing" the mix. Test it in the car, the home stereo, your buddy's car, your iPod,,,, and they all sound different and most sound bad in one way or another.

Ideally, you want to use good speakers in a treated room.

Of course, it's not always possible to have a treated room so we do have to accept the inherent compromises of reality. That's how most of us work. We learn the room, and mix accordingly. Test with cans and test with other players in other rooms and eventually get to the point where we can produce decent mixes that work well in most situations. Treating a room is not simply a matter of buying some sound absorbing things and hanging them on the walls and ceiling. Although that's what most folks do. There's science and physics behind the proper placement of sound absorbers and reflective surfaces in a studio.

Another option regarding treated rooms is to use technology and use something like ARC. http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/arc/ Advanced Room Correction software. It has a calibrated mic and the software to analyze the room and automatically correct the sound coming out of the speakers so that what you hear in your mixing position/chair, is as accurate as your speakers can make it. Essentially, it claims to remove the room from the equation. I use this and I know several other studio owners who use this on all of their mixes. It seems to work fairly well but in and of itself, it's not a replacement for using proper treatment.

Mixing on headphones: Some folks do. I have done this as well. I guess it really comes down to.... you gotta do what you gotta do. However, mixing with cans is not the ideal way. So many of the less expensive cans are consumer oriented and therefore are made with a built in bias on the sound they produce. If you mix in cans, be sure to double check the mix and triple check it too, on other systems with speakers to be sure it's not coming across as an unbalanced mix. It's really easy to get an "ear-candy" headphone mix that sounds like crap in a good stereo.

So yes, the room is really critical to the finished mix.

BTW: a really, really, really good book to read on this topic, for a much deeper understanding of rooms and acoustics is called Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio by Mike Senior. The first few chapters cover speakers and sound laying a critical base upon which to build an understanding. If you don't have this book, buy it and study it. If you do have it, pull it off the shelf, dust it off, and read/study it again.

EDIT: I'm in the process of building/rehabbing a small 16x16 building into my future music studio. All of the things I have said in this and more are coming into play for me as I move through the building process. Currently, the building is insulated, rough inspected, and ready to start with the sheet rock and wood on the walls. Room treatment is on the top of my mind.

Last edited by Guitarhacker; 11/29/16 03:48 AM.
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