sound perception

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spottydog10

Member
On my tracks when mixing, things sound pretty balanced sitting at the listening position. (the monitors are about 2 feet away from me, it's a small room)
But if I stand and move back say another 3 feet things become much bassier and wooly.
Obviously physics comes in to play here but If I bung on a commercial track this does not happen to anything like the same extent if at all.
If I then try and find and cut the frequencies on my track to correct this distance issue it all sounds thin and weedy at the listening position.

Any explanations and tips to work on this?

Thanks,
Mike
 
How much acoustic treatment in the room? More than likely, your room is cancelling some low end frequencies at the listening position, which makes you add them. OR the room is adding low end in your second listening position a few feet back. It could be both.

One reason it doesn't seem as bad with commercial CD's, besides mastered CD's tend to be very controlled in a way that raw mixes aren't, is that you could be adding the problem frequency of the room as your low end, where the commercial CD's are using a different low end frequency that isn't excited by the room as much.

This is one of the reason why people take their mixes out to the car to check.
 
Hi Jay,
There is no treatment in the room.
I have got ARC2 on the master bus and that has helped things quite a bit, I know some people are not convinced by it but it certainly does help as mixes are more balanced when I play them on different systems and different places.
I agree with what you say about commercial tracks, the question is how do I improve?
Ta,
Mike
 
You need to acoustically treat your room. Because of the size and shape of your room, the frequency response will be all over the place. There is nothing you can do with EQ or processing to overcome that problem. So, you need acoustic treatment. Until then, your monitoring environment will be lying to you, so you won't be able to consistently produce good mixes. Because you never actually hear what they sound like.
 
spottydog10 said:
Hi Jay,
There is no treatment in the room.
I have got ARC2 on the master bus and that has helped things quite a bit, I know some people are not convinced by it but it certainly does help as mixes are more balanced when I play them on different systems and different places.
I agree with what you say about commercial tracks, the question is how do I improve?
Ta,
Mike
Click to expand...
One question, as much a curiosity on my part actually but might be an angle to look at, when you say 'helped as mixes are more balanced when I play them on different systems and different places'- might that be more from the 'wooly/bassy or 'thin reedy camps?
:D
Just was going to mention the checking our mixes 'from the other room' (and/or 'very quietly' -similar but another useful alt perspective as well). The first of those's main attribute is it renders most of those 'perfect monitoring and 'only in the sweet spot' stuff we strive for almost irrelevant. The balances are what they are from 'there' -which represents a version of 'anywhere and the mix should survive.
 
Jay, I cant do a lot of treatment in this room for various reasons.
But if I could do, what would be the most effective for this particular problem, bass traps?

Mixsit, less wooly and less reedy, just a better balance overall.
I do check the mixes from different areas and even different rooms but me arms aren't long enough to tweak from there:)
 
Bass traps in the corners and first reflection points. That is the starting point.

Your position in the room matters too. If your mix position is in the center of the room, it will never sound good. You want to be about 1/3 of the distance between the front wall and the back wall. This is one of the reasons small rooms suck. if the room issmal enough, by the time you getthe desk in there, you are already too far from the wall.
 
I think room treatment can be important but I noticed something in the original post.

His own mix sounds wooly in the room at large. But a commercially done recording of something else sounds great, in the same room, with no changes in room treatment.

So, I thought about it. The commercial mix was done probably in a pro studio or at least a space built like one, gigantor collection of gear. Then mastered by someone else in sometimes a totally different city in different gear by a guy with a totally different mindset in his own specially designed room for mastering.

So, can you mix something to match your sound sample in the room that you have? Maybe, maybe not. Chances are, you will succeed in making that sound in your room, as is but it won't be the same patch as the original engineers. They got "that" sound with treated rooms and thousands of dollars of gear and software.

Much as I hate to admit it, people mix my recordings far better than I do because they can hear things in my voice that I am "blind" to.

If I may be allowed, I would like to post some recordings. Warning, karaoke tracks were used but the final product still required mixing.

The first one was mixed for me by a guy who really knows what he is doing.

"Rainbow in the Dark" by Ronnie James Dio

https://www.box.com/s/2bb14d0f35647355b382

The second one, I mixed myself. Not only did I botch the mix, but my voice was recovering from a self-induced vocal injury brought on by me trying to mimick Brian Johnson. Stupid, I know, but I learn the hard way.

"I Don't Believe in Love" by Queensryche

https://www.box.com/s/f01abfff3963930ddb4d

Sometimes, you have to get outside of yourself, or change the room. Mixing is a totally different skill from performing.

My opinion and $1.70 USD will get you a Diet Coke.
 
What's happening is that you're moving into areas of your room where certain frequencies build up at their respective nodes and add on top of each other, effectively boosting their loudness while others are destroying each other through phase cancellation. Lower frequencies are more susceptible to this phenomenon, which is why especially kicks and snares have to be recorded properly or you'll get shit sounds that have no body or low end and just go *tink* but it really happens to all sounds.
This is called comb filtering.

You can actually use some FUN MATH to find out what frequencies are getting lost and which ones are going apeshit:

Obtain:
1. Distance from the speaker to wall behind you (assuming it's flat)

Lets say that distance is 3 meters.
Now you calculate which frequency has a wave length of 3 meteres.
You do this with this formula:
Speed of sound (343 m/s) divided by a frequency (let's say 500hz, so 343/500 = 0.686m wave length of a 500Hz sine wave)
In this case, you have to reverse the formula so you get: 343/3 meters = 114.3 Hz. That is the frequency of the first wave that will create a node and boost it's own volume in a room that has a 3 meter distance between the speakers and the wall behind it.
All it's multiples will do the same thing, so 228.6, 343.2, etc.


I'm 99% that's how it goes.


You can never get rid off all the problems but you can minimize the pain through room treatment.
 
Schwarzenyaeger said:
..You can actually use some FUN MATH to find out what frequencies are getting lost and which ones are going apeshit:

Obtain:
1. Distance from the speaker to wall behind you (assuming it's flat)

Lets say that distance is 3 meters.
Now you calculate which frequency has a wave length of 3 meteres.
You do this with this formula:
Speed of sound (343 m/s) divided by a frequency (let's say 500hz, so 343/500 = 0.686m wave length of a 500Hz sine wave)
In this case, you have to reverse the formula so you get: 343/3 meters = 114.3 Hz. That is the frequency of the first wave that will create a node and boost it's own volume in a room that has a 3 meter distance between the speakers and the wall behind it.
All it's multiples will do the same thing, so 228.6, 343.2, etc.


I'm 99% that's how it goes.


You can never get rid off all the problems but you can minimize the pain through room treatment.
Click to expand...
A short cut;
hunecke.de | Room Eigenmodes Calculator
 
I actuay got something wrong. The wave in my example won't boost, it would disappear since the wave would come back reversed.
 
the basic reason behind this is that lower frequencies have longer wavelengths, where's muttley to explain this further? we need a scientist!
 
All very interesting but your not answering the fundamental question in this thread.
Why is the commercially produced low end not changing as I move away from the speakers but my own tracks change considerably?
 
Could be because it was professionally mixed and mastered and the low end was properly balanced to begin with....all in a pro studio that was acoustically treated.

IOW....your mix in your room is lying to you from the start no matter what you put on the master bus...so your are comparing apples to oranges.
 
spottydog10 said:
All very interesting but your not answering the fundamental question in this thread.
Why is the commercially produced low end not changing as I move away from the speakers but my own tracks change considerably?
Click to expand...

the question has been answered, you just aren't listening
 
Mmmm...I think my answer was very specific, if you can accept that reality. ;)

Is that you Barry?
Turtle_Michael...?
 
Nope...but you must be when you keep asking for explanations after they've been clearly given.

Your stuff was/is not the same quality from square-one as the commercial music you are comparing it to, never mind the mixing/mastering of that commercial music....so it's not going to react the same way to your "stepping back" experiment.
You don't have any treatment, and you want an answer that doesn't involve room treatment.
You use a band-aid across your master buss to compensate for that, and yet you don't realize that doing so changes things in a synthetic way, or the fact that a plug doesn't = actual room treatment.

Yup...accept the reality.
 
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