Stereo Mix isn't translating well when played through smartphone speakers

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smendenhall93

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Sorry if this is a really noob question, but I'm having trouble figuring out why my stereo mix sounds very poor when played through my smartphone speakers. Specifically, the guitars that are panned hard-right are hardly coming through the mix. They are quieter and are not balanced with the guitars that are panned hard-left. To troubleshoot the issue, I exported my entire mix in mono, instead of stereo, and then played it through my smartphone speakers and the hard-panned right guitars sound normal. I feel confident this is a routing issue.

My guitar tracks are all mono tracks that are routed to a stereo group channel. That group channel is routed to the Stereo Out. All stereo plugins are placed on the group channel.

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
 
The best way to listen on smartphone speakers is to place them at the bottom of a bucket of water. They are dreadful excuses for music reproduction.

That said, I don't know much about your smartphone. It could be a phase issue, where you are inadvertently adding two signals that are cancelling each other. It could be a plug-in that is inverting phase. You can easily check that by doing a quick audio file with a LEFT..... CENTER..... RIGHT.... message made up so all three are exactly the same level with no modification.
 
It really could be that the phone is really only be playing the one side.
 
I'll take my stereo mixed file, duplicate it, then merge the two together on one track, then export that track as a mono file. The stereo balance stays intact when played on any device. Kind of what you did for trouble shooting. But I don't route into groups and all that. I just take my tracks, pan accordingly, add output fx, then mix down to a stereo file. I try to keep it simple and it's a method that works for me and get decent results. Of course I'm not trying to get a job and Sunset Sound engineering or be a rock star. It's more of a hobby. Although I have done theme music for a couple of local wrestlers, to which one song was also being played in between innings at a minor league ball park, and end credit song on an old C rated horror movie. Plus a few parodies here and there just for laughs. Also started doing custom ring tones which is pretty cool.
 
Assuming you've avoided any phase issues in the mix...and your phone is genuinely "stereo" (what model is it?)....then you're likely trying to make a the phone sound like something it can't. No matter what....do not make any mix adjustments based on how your mix sounds on phone speakers.

Mick
 
Do smartphones have 2 speakers? Or does the OP mean an external device - maybe its a bluetooth issue?
 
Just to be clear, the problem is the phone, not your mix.
If it sounded bad listening on your phone with earbuds, that would be something else. But the built in speakers on a phone aren't there for quality. Anyone listening that way obviously doesn't care what it sounds like. You shouldn't make mix decisions based on what it sounds like on a severely compromised system.
 
Farview said:
Anyone listening that way obviously doesn't care what it sounds like.
Click to expand...

That is not true. The reproduction of audio is not very good - but it doesn't mean they don't care.
@smedenhall93 - you phone isn't true stereo so all kinds of anomalies are going to show up. Try it with
ear bud and see if it's the same - if so it could mean you guitars are out of phase with each other.
 
Papanate said:
That is not true. The reproduction of audio is not very good - but it doesn't mean they don't care.
Click to expand...
If they cared about the listening experience they are having, they would do something else.

I guess my point was that making mix decisions based on a severely compromised listening situation doesn't make sense. You as a mix engineer are not responsible for all the possible screwed up ways someone could end up listening to your music.

I knew one guy that hooked up his stereo to his Marshall 4x12 cabinets and thought it was the greatest thing in the world. But if my mix didn't sound right on that system, I didn't blame my mix.

When listening to commercial music in a compromised situation, we tend to accept that it sounds bad because of the system. With our own mixes, we actually have control over them so we question what we did, instead of questioning the situation.
 
I really don't get it..... pro mixes translate to phones, and all mediums. There is a fine line spectrally and dynamically that you have to nail to get it to work though.

Certainly wouldn't be happy losing instruments alltogether on a phone, I would have to insist on getting to the bottom of it instead of just saying (it's a phone, what do you expect?) that's crazy to me......

Bounce your track to stereo and email or dropbox to your phone, take the routing out of the equation, still sounds shitty? your phone must be the issue. You already established your mix works when bounced to mono, your phone can have a duff speaker if you bounce to mono and still sound fine. A stereo bounce to your phone with a duff speaker would sound odd.... like you described.

I'd be sending a sinewave to that phone on your current setup to see what the hell is going on, then i'd pan it left then right to see if one of the speakers is not outputting correctly. Maybe you are not picking up on other stereo mixes being skewed because you don't know those mixes as intimately as you do your own. All speculation. But I don't think dismissing your mix sounding good on a phone just because it's a phone is the right way forward in this case.

I am aware I am only one of the very few on here with this opinion. Definitely the black sheep over here.

EDIT: The problems you described are the opposite of normal, those guitars sould be louder in stereo, and a few dbs quiter in mono. all hard panned stuff would be. So with that in mind. If you said your guitars went quieter in mono and balances changed elsewhere, I'd say yeah...... that's completely normal.
 
A pro mix won't translate to a phone any better than your mix will. But since you can't do anything about the pro mix, you accept what you hear as being "right". You don't evaluate or question that mix.

The fact that you have control over your mix makes you question how it's translating.

In this case, losing one guitar part is probably due to the phone only playing the left channel (some devices don't sum the LR to play mono). The answer to this problem would be to mix in mono.

Would you decide to only mix in mono so that it translates perfectly to a phone that only has one speaker? Of course not.

There was a low watt radio station in Chicago that played metal at night. It was fm mono, but whoever set the station up didn't sum the left right from the cd players, so it only broadcast the left channel. If they played early van Halen, all you would hear of the guitar was the reverb. Was it the responsibility of the guy mixing the van Halen albums to anticipate a poorly set up radio station 10 years later?

Of course you can make a special mix for special circumstances. Back when am radio was the main listening platform for the general public, it was not unusual for there to be a dedicated mono mix to be sent to radio stations for this purpose.
 
His phone sounds off when listening to a stereo file though, which phones would be expecting. There shouldn't be a problem unless his phone was to convert the stereo file to mono and as you say L+R doesn't function well.

If it's the case that some devices play to mono by just muting a speaker, then I'm gobsmacked! Should be outlawed. hah. I just don't understand why a phone with 2 speakers would ever sum to mono. Unless you can choose in the phone settings to output mono. Which I have no clue what you can and can't tweak on phones.

I'll download multitracks and listen to the pro mix reference (same tracks, same everything) but can really struggle to get my mix to translate to crappy speaker while the pro mix does, I purposely have a crappy speaker wired up that I can reference through by pushing a button, in honesty it's just a step up from a crappy phone speaker but this is how I know that my mix is just not up to standard. At that point imo, it becomes a science, and metres are needed to reference LUFS, transients, Spectral information, Stereo readings etc. Takes the fun right out of it but is something I always strive for.

Farview:
The fact that you have control over your mix makes you question how it's translating.

The truth! when you have control, it's a slippery slope, I hear ya
 
I asked the OP what the phone model was. So far there has been no answer. Maybe based on the model we could determine any tech issues with the phone. The OP basically said that a mono mix / master played ok on the phone. I also asked about any possible phase issues in the original mic placement or maybe even some DAW adjustments. Again.....no answer as yet. We've all been there with phase issues that result in very similar issues that the OP is complaining about.

Mick
 
Let's be honest here. A good mix will always sound the best your phone can manage. If you mix for a phone, then it will sound dreadful on anything else. That also applies to laptops too. When people post on these forums, I click on my MacBook and it's loud and OK enough. If they ask about the bass, then I have to trudge off to the studio to comment. Phones are even worse. My wife is listening to the radio on hers in the garden. It's thin and weedy, but I know what the songs are. Lows are absent and stereo non-existent.
The comment above rings very true with me -
If they cared about the listening experience they are having, they would do something else.
Click to expand...
For casual, non-critical listening, phones and laptops can do a job - just a pretty poor one from the musical perspective. It's like the audio version of a low framerate, static, poorly lit subject. Lots of people are happy with this too. From six feet away, can any of us tell anything useful about the stereo field? There just isn't one.
 
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