Knowing Your Limitations

[Bobbsy]

You should be mixing at about 70-80dB SPL, which is pretty much the sound of a passenger car driving by from about 10 meters. Any louder than that for long periods of time can result in permanent hearing damage. EPA recommends 70dB SPL max before using hearing protection.

Yeah.

But tell that to the generation who want to drown out traffic (or train or airplane) noise with their earbuds wedged tightly against the eardrum--then go out to a club at night and listen to the effwit DJ drive the sound system into the red because "my fans like it loud and the distortion sounds good".

We've bred a generation or two of people with severe hearing loss by the time they're 20.

 

[grimtraveller]

Pardon ?

Yeah.

But tell that to the generation who want to drown out traffic (or train or airplane) noise with their earbuds wedged tightly against the eardrum--then go out to a club at night and listing to the effwit DJ drive the sound system into the red because "my fans like it loud and the distortion sounds good".

We've bred a generation or two of people with severe hearing loss by the time they're 20.

My wife and I were talking about this at the weekend coz she went out with some of her sisters to some birthday do and she was saying she hated it because the place played the music so loud that she couldn't have conversations with some of the people she didn't know. I was reflecting on how the three kinds of clubs I used to frequent {heavy metal, soul, reggae} in the 80s played the music so loud that if you did try to talk you inevitably left the place at the end of the evening with a sore throat and the risk of impending deafness !
Still, the girls were cute. Well, some of them were. Some of them were what I'd now politely refer to as "positively no overdubs !".

 

[illumination]

Your only limitation is yourself. You can make great mixes in a concrete bathroom with laptop speakers if you learn how those mixes translate onto legit systems. It takes trial and error and lots of time. But it can be done.

CLA more or less mentioned in an interview that he grew up listening to music on devices with small speakers and was blown away and inspired by how he could still distinguish instruments (in a good mix) through small shitty speakers on say a condenser tape deck, boombox, etc. He says he mixes almost exclusively on ns10's, which don't sound particularly great as it is.
People listen to SHYT i mean mp3's through their cell phone speaker these days, and they'll traverse great distances with such a configuration.
on a side-note, I can vouch for Opeth's Watershed as a great example of incredible sound through good mixing reproduced on shit speakers (located en mi carro, for instance) There are few albums that have the monster-balls like that one.
and on the other-side-note, Beats is a great example of taking shitty 32-96kbps quality mp3s and "making it sound professional"

need sleep...