CD Mastering

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shonnel7

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Hey guys,
I have a pair of Event 20/20 monitors. When I mix music, it sounds great and balanced. When I take the CD to a home stereo system, a car stereo system or a boom box, it sounds like junk. I tried everything; it still sounds like junk. When I compare it with other CDs, or even with a simple rap CD, any CD makes my CD sound like junk! When I burn my CD and play it back on my Event 20/20, it sounds great. What can be wrong here? All I use are keyboards such as the Korg Triton. The signals are clean! When I record a sound from the Triton, it sounds exactly like the Triton when I play it back. When I put it all together and play it on different stereo systems, my CD sound like crap! I hear about compression and I hear about this and I hear about that. Please guys, what am I doing wrong? I read all of the time about this and that and nothing seem to be working. Maybe it is just me and the answer that you guys give me today may help some else too.

Thanks,
Shonnel
 
Define Junk?...... What bad sounds are you hearing... ?
One mistake i made way back was mixng down through a receiver, with all the treble and bass turned to full (accidentally)... I would tend to roll off mega highs and lows, from my mix, and accentuate mids. to make it sound right on this set-up... then when the mix was played elsewhere, it sounded, like a song playing on the Am radio...
 
The highs are too high and lows are too low. Everything is not tight together. The frequences are not blended right.

Thanks,
shonnel7
 
A way to get the sound you want.... Put up a cd through your event 20/20's.. and mix along side it, switching back and forth, between yours and the cd.... I used to do this all the time way back , but then just sort of developed my own sound... If it sounds good on your events... I still think it is a problem with the eq on the receiver or pre-amp the events are hooked up to. Maybe they are turned down all the way, as opposed to what i said in the above post....and your mixing to compensate it... I don't think it's your mixing, If your happy with it on the events, it should be good everywhere else (pretty much)..... Thats all I can really say, other than experiment.
 
shonnel7 -

A fact about studio monitoring that is different then listening through home stereo components is that mostly, home stereo components do all sorts of things to hype the highs and lows.

In studio monitoring, there are many good reasons to NOT do this very same thing, of which I am not going to explain.

I am going to venture out here and say that the room you are monitoring in is probably going to be your worst friend! Rear wall reflections will kill you while mixing. Anyway, not much "cheap" stuff you can do to fix that, and you can still "learn" to mix in that room, although with bad acoustics, it will be harder.

I agree that you should be using a professionally recorded CD to reference your mix to. Preferably, you should also use the same D/A converters too. This way, you can hear a song that you like the sound of through the same monitors that you are mixing on. You may be very surprised at how "present" the midrange is on most near field monitors, and you will find that you can't mix to have those huge low's and sparkling highs like you hear in a home stereo system. Again, refer to the above statements about how most home stereo systems hype the highs and lows.

I could go on and on about this stuff, but I think you get the gist of it. Reference you mix through the same monitors against professional mixes and you should do much better.

Good luck.

Ed
 
All of the above comments are right on. I would add that in referencing commercial mixes what you'll notice is that the goal of a good mix is NOT to create a mix with hyped frequencies like people would do on their stereo EQs. If you hyped the lows and the highs in the monitors, you wouldn't have any room to go on your stereo. The goal of a good mix is to get everything working with each other "tightly" with everything being "clear" and the mix relatively "flat". Each genre of music will have certain subtleties that create a less than flat mix. Country doesn't hype the highs and has a midrangy quality. R&B and hip hop have a bump in the low mids and lows and a touch of higs (program dependent), etc.... But for the most part a good mix is relatively "flat", frequency-wise. The $64,000 issue is that "flat" means something different depending on the amp, the D/A converters, the monitors and the room that you're mixing in. So you've got to really learn your monitors and room, etc by using good commercial mixes to find out your limits.

E
 
See also another post on here called "too much bass"... its pretty recent...
 
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