mixing in a vacuum?

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nate_dennis

nate_dennis

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I'm new to the art of recording and mixing. I'm saving up to build my studio (after selling off a lot stuff about a year ago.) All of that to say that I spend a lot of time reading about and thinking about recording and mixing etc. The thought occured to me that we spend a lot of time and money and energy to acoustically treat our rooms for mixing but doesn't this amount to mixing in a vacuum? No one listens to music in these environments so the sound represented by $1000+ monitors in treated rooms is not what is conveyed to the listener. I just thought I'd ask if anyone else has thought this way or what your thoughts are on it. I'm not arguing the fact that we should do these things . . just thought I'd see what all of your thoughts are on it.
 
Treating a room doesn´t mean making it a totally dead space.
You just try to make the bass response nice and get rid of some first reflections.
 
It is sort-of in a vacuum but there's no such thing as a typical listening environment. The aim is to come up with a mix that translates to all sorts of situations - clubs, living rooms, cars, headphones, etc.

The compromise is to set up your monitoring environment so that you can hear the sound as accurately as is reasonable (as ever there's a law of diminishing returns). Then you familiarize yourself with that environment by listening to professional recordings that you know translate to other environments. That helps tune your ears. In fact using professional recordings as references while you mix helps "reset" your ears - they don't even have to be in the same genre as what you're mixing. This is particularly important when using EQ as your ears can get used to a particular boost and tune it out and that will end up skewing your mix.
 
You can't mix in a vacuum, because a medium is required for the propagation of sound waves :p

OK, serious note: no, that's not correct. The basic problem is you can't predict the acoustic errors that will occur in a given playback system, so it is impossible to mix for them. Instead, you make the best mix you can in an acoustically correct space, and the listener must cope with their own limitations.

If you are looking for justification not to spend the time on acoustic treatment, consider that every commercial CD on your shelf/mp3 player was probably recorded, mixed, and mastered in rooms with appropriate acoustics on very-high end systems. If they could get it right in a bedroom with a boom box, why wouldn't they save the money?
 
mshilarious said:
If you are looking for justification not to spend the time on acoustic treatment. . .
Click to expand...

That's not what I am doing at all. In fact I said that in my original post. I'm just trying to wrap my mind around all the things going on. But it does make sense. The idea is that we make the best "image" possible so that even people with poor vision can see a nice picture? Good stuff.
 
nate_dennis said:
The idea is that we make the best "image" possible so that even people with poor vision can see a nice picture?
Click to expand...
That's a very good way of thinking about it...I like that! Just to associate that with audio, think of this:

If you're listening to an obvious high-quality production on a car stereo or mini/shelf stereo or something like that your brain kind of knows what of what you're hearing is due to the restrictions of your stereo and what is actually due to the recording. You can more often than not see through the veneer of the playback system and tell that there's something really good behind those crappy plastic speakers. How many times have you said or heard, "Man I can't wait to hear this on a *really* good system!"

OTOH, if the mix is crappy or amateurish-sounding, it will sound that way on a boom box in a closet as well as on an audiophile system in a treated entertainment room. The quality - or lack thereof - of the playback system or environment may color what you hear, but it rarely will actually mask the sound in any way that keeps you from telling whether it's a quality mix or not.

Furthermore, acoustic treatment in the studio is not meant to make the room sound "good" or sound like any other playback room. The purpose of such treatment is just the opposite - to try and remove the room from the equation as much as possible so that the effects it has (good or bad) on what you hear are minimal. The idea is to allow you to listen with as little unintentional bias as possible so you can accurately mix what is there instead of what you think you hear is there.

G.
 
Check it out. These two questions ...
https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=272636
are about the same thing -but for one being about the speaker end of the combination.

Notice that as you go from one listening situation to another you will always hear a mix differently, different aspects pop up, or hide etc. The value of a known, reasonably accurate base reference point is simple minimizing external variables.

The 'alternate' listening condition's value is aspects of a mix change as it is heard from a different point of view.
Sometimes a mix can sound good in the 'neutral' environment, but show up nasties' in the lumpy jacked up alternate play back speakers and spaces. The alternate views are good for that reason, but as there's about an infinite number a ways to have jacked' up rough sound' :D -not so good for making the base line reference.
 
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