Mixes on my BX8's don't translate at all!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Yareek
  • Start date Start date
Well I rearranged the room, and it made a pretty big difference.

Before:

Room.jpg


After:

Room2.jpg


I'd say the big thing is the monitors being spaced out farther on the stands, which REALLY REALLY helped the imaging. The other big difference is the high end is a little clearer, which was something that was bugging me before.

Now it's pretty apparent that the left monitor is a good deal, maybe 3 to 5 dB louder than the right. I'm assuming this has something to do with the layout of the room, but at least a short-term solution of adjusting the balance helped a lot.

Problems that are coming up, besides the monitor volume imbalance is a rattling window. When up to volume, and not even cranked but just monitoring volume, my old window rattles. The BX8's have rear ports and it just so happens one is firing right into the glass. Window could also be causing the energy loss on the right side that's making the speaker quieter...I don't know.

The Blue Sky's will be here on Monday, so I'll be curious to hear how they sound with this setup.

And if I'm productive enough with my vacation time, I'll try building some of these.

Thanks for the help, and hopefully I can finish off these mixes.
 
I liked the idea of the closet in the back helping. Maybe throw something on the wall in there too. It adds more sqft depth and if full of stuff you have diffuser and absorbers.

It was always confusing as most MixEng's have the glass in front of them..not drywall? But most HR they say to throw absorbers there?
(Off the subject, one guy hung a mirror in place of the glass and it looked pretty cool, made the room look deep.)


1) Basics, does your regular favorites sound good in there?

2) the goal, IMO, is that we want all the "music", once moved outside your 3' EE triangle, to disappear and never return to the EE traingle.
The return "left over crap" causes peaks and valleys in the playback whch trick your ears causing you poor judgement resulting in ASS mixes.
In other words, Only the speakers immediate ouput is wanted.
(Personally, I think this can be helped by reducing volumes in the HR studios, to where all the sound seems to be coming from your monitors only.(not the room..this is where bass is a bitch)

3) and still, my best final results are after going to a few familiar outside the studio playback systems and taking notes,

4) beware who you take inputs from? :confused:

in all honesty, I still think my mixes suck!!!..and I don't think its the room or the monitors! :eek:

tally ho...good luck.
;)
 
Well, I got about 20 minutes of mixing before ear fatigue set in...that's a new record low. The "clearer highs" certainly have a tradeoff.

Well I'm not blaming the monitors as I know the room is imperfect, so I'll compare them to the new ones and see how that works. I still think for my needs and for this room the Blue Skies are more promising (sealed boxes, different tweeters, less difference between mids and tweets, separate sub).

So I'll report back on Monday once those guys are in.
 
Yareek said:
Now it's pretty apparent that the left monitor is a good deal, maybe 3 to 5 dB louder than the right.
QUOTE]

This doesn't sound right. Of course with upper-end monitors you get serial matching pairs, but I'm still wondering if it isn't your space that is creating the skew. Window rattling, yeah that's a bad thing. Without getting too technical into this, it is simply logical that it is...there is no decoupling (like a shock absorber on a car) going on with your setup. You have access to some kind of foam, right? Hopefully it is acoustic foam, but if not, shove bats of fluffy insulation in the window for the time being to help absorp the vibrations, DEFINITELY rigid fiberglass like mineral you said you may have access to, and that would be so much better. It's not rocket science on the rattling, low end from BX8s (which you want in mixing, just controlled). You have some decent monitors doing things your previous monitors didn't. So if you have excessive vibration (which low frequencies do), put something good like that mineral wool you were speaking of in the window recession.

Glad to hear your sound is getting better. I don't have personal experience with BX8s, but I've read from other users they are a decent monitor. :) :)
Click to expand...
 
Wait a sec, did you just place your monitors in the corners??
 
No they're about two feet out from the corners though. Just on either side of the desk. The drawing isn't perfect :D

Next weekend I'll go raid my grandparents' construction supplies (they've got a pole barn full of lumber and random other stuff).
 
I've been useing bx8's for a year and they translate pretty good not perfect but they are adjustable. I had to tweek the room feature and the low roll off so that I was not over bassing things. I am in a pretty bad room to. I always get it where I think it needs to be and then run around to different boom boxes, radios, my truck.

I look for things on all decent systems and then compromise.
I don't think any monitor system will get me to translation nirvana. I am sure I could do beter than bx8's but they aren't bad.

To me I like the adjustability. if I am over bassing I can come in and boost the bass on the monitors and remix. same with treble or mid.

I have only adjusted them once but it far improved translation.


F.S.
 
I've had a funny feeling about this thread for a while now, and Freud's post made me realized what it was: an apparenly ralther common misunderstanding of what "translation" means or at least of it's importance when chosing monitors.

What translation doesn't mean:

- translation does NOT mean getting a monitor that sounds as "good" (i.e. as pleasurable or even as correct) sounding as possible. That quality has no of-necessity direct relation to the ability to translate mixes.

- translation does NOT mean getting a monitor that sounds as identical to outside world sources. If it were, there'd be no need to translate anything; the speakers would be speaking the same language, so to speak.

What translation does mean:

- (Over)simply put, translation is the ability to know that if a mix sounds like "A" in the studio, that it'll sound like "B" outside the studio. Translation is somewhat like leading the target. Because of the monitoring environment, one may make a mix that sound slightly off in the studio, but will sound correct by the time it makes it to the target listening environment.

If one gets monitors that sound (to one's own ears) perfect in a perfect room, one still will often need to perform some translation - i.e. create a mix that sounds somewhat "off" in the studio - to make an optimal mix. Conversely, sometimes it takes a less-than-ideal monitoring environment to keep the amount of translation to a minimum (can anybody say "NS-10"?)

G.
 
Yeah, that's what I originally meant. And I've got myself a million times more confused scrutinizing over the mixes and trying to figure out the translation. What would be optimal is to mix it so it sounds great in my room, then bring it around and it sounds great everywhere else.

From the responses, it sounds like I've got three factors at work: the mix, the monitors, and the room.

Obviously, the mix is not going to be a constant; it will be changing. So you want the other variables to be constant. The room seems to be screwing with the levels up and down the frequencies. And the monitors seem to have something funny going from about 2k on up.

So the apparent solution is to treat the room and reduce as much as possible the frequency discrepancies. And that would allow me to figure out much easier the translation plot between my monitors and the rest of the world. I.e. once the room is treated, I find out my monitors have a spike around 2k and a roll off above 8k or something like that. Then it's a matter of learning to mix around that and/or eventually getting NICE monitors.

For me, I'm going to try placing some fiberglass in the room, in the corners and hopefully on the sides as well. I'm also going to try the different monitors (as they're on their way anyway) and see if that helps.

I may end up, especially if I send back these new monitors, checking out one of these guys to A/B mixes in mono:

Tivoli Model One

It would probably be a lot more useful than different monitors, especially since it's cheap and I actually would have a secondary use for it (I enjoy listening to AM radio).
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
I've had a funny feeling about this thread for a while now, and Freud's post made me realized what it was: an apparenly ralther common misunderstanding of what "translation" means or at least of it's importance when chosing monitors.

What translation doesn't mean:

- translation does NOT mean getting a monitor that sounds as "good" (i.e. as pleasurable or even as correct) sounding as possible. That quality has no of-necessity direct relation to the ability to translate mixes.

- translation does NOT mean getting a monitor that sounds as identical to outside world sources. If it were, there'd be no need to translate anything; the speakers would be speaking the same language, so to speak.

What translation does mean:

- (Over)simply put, translation is the ability to know that if a mix sounds like "A" in the studio, that it'll sound like "B" outside the studio. Translation is somewhat like leading the target. Because of the monitoring environment, one may make a mix that sound slightly off in the studio, but will sound correct by the time it makes it to the target listening environment.

If one gets monitors that sound (to one's own ears) perfect in a perfect room, one still will often need to perform some translation - i.e. create a mix that sounds somewhat "off" in the studio - to make an optimal mix. Conversely, sometimes it takes a less-than-ideal monitoring environment to keep the amount of translation to a minimum (can anybody say "NS-10"?)

G.
Click to expand...


I agree that it's in the hands of the mixer but, It helps to have monitors that sound right to you when the mix is right. There's no perfect situation though.
I think the use of the word translation in regards to how your mix sounds in the real world as compared to over you monitors is valid. Ya it will never sound the same and you need to know your speakers. You also need to know how a garden variety stereo is likely to react to your mix. No one can denie though that it's is alot easier to mix on nice monitors than crappy ones that don't sound pretty good to you when the mix is right.

F.S.
 
Ugh, spending the last hour resoldering my cables. One speaker is half as loud as the other, and it seems to be at the cable level.

Initial sound isn't that great, I'll have to wait until I've got a fully operating sound card here, but I'm almost preferring the BX8's. I like the sub, maybe I'll just trade down the BX8's for smaller BX5's and add a sub after I treat the room. :rolleyes:
 
Well I've been listening to both speakers back and forth on tons of material for a couple hours now.

They are polar opposites.

The Blue Sky's are hollow in the mids (right around 1 kHz...I swept around with a parametric while listening), slightly lifted around 10 kHz or so, pretty rough around 150 to 200 Hz as the crappy little midrange speaker bottoms out, and fairly smooth in the sub bass. The subwoofer is great...better than the 4 or 5 hi-fi subs I've had and although not quite as good as the Image Dynamics 12" sub I had in my car, still fairly accurate. Seems to be overpowered for the system (or the system is underpowered).

The BX8's are basically smoother versions of NS10's with extended bass and treble response. The midrange has a pretty good peak around 2 kHz, almost sounding like a horn. There is a pretty sizable rolloff around 8 kHz or so, and the bass is actually pretty smooth down to 50 Hz or so.

Midrange detail hops out on the BX8's so much that you can't really concentrate on the high end, whereas the Blue Sky's are so hollow in the mids that you can't really trust them. The Blue Sky's are far less fatiguing than the BX8's because of the midrange and the highs are very pleasant to listen to. There is also more air and detail in the high end because of this.

So right now I'm at a complete loss and I don't really know that it's worthwhile to "upgrade" to the Blue Skies because of the midrange. I'm very much tempted to buy them and swap out what appear to be $5 Goldwood plastic woofers with some $50 Seas woofers for better low end and more detail. But then I'm also thinking if I drop $650 on the speakers and mids, I can build a set of bookshelf speakers with 6.5" Seas woofers and Vifa XT25 tweeters than would spank pretty much anything under $1000 for less than $500.

Well, just thought someone might be curious to know about these guys. I'll let them break in for a couple more days. I might also see about picking up one single BX5 as a mono or A/B thing. Not sure yet, but I'll try and get some fiberglass rolls in here and listen again.
 
Alright, well I'll give these guys a week or so and see how they sound. I have a feeling they're going back. I'll have to save more money for some decent monitors I suppose.

On the plus side, this website sells 2' x 4' x 4" traps for $60. I figure it's $420 to get six traps built and shipped and about $250 to get materials to build six traps. Might be worth it to pay for the finished product.
 
Yareek said:
Alright, well I'll give these guys a week or so and see how they sound. I have a feeling they're going back. I'll have to save more money for some decent monitors I suppose.

On the plus side, this website sells 2' x 4' x 4" traps for $60. I figure it's $420 to get six traps built and shipped and about $250 to get materials to build six traps. Might be worth it to pay for the finished product.
Click to expand...

Does those traps have an 1.5" spacing from the wall?
 
studiomaster said:
Does those traps have an 1.5" spacing from the wall?
Click to expand...

No it looks like fabric around fiberglass and a light frame. You could hang it 1.5" from the wall if you wanted to.
 
great post..Yareek your making huge headway.
the rearranged room and Triangle, monitor spacing... looks like it has to be a positive noticeable improvement...and the strange cable deal...and the first few panels will most likely be noticeable. (or at least some anti-drywall material).

my material cover job wasn't too hot, the driving all over to some Industrial back parking lot to get the 703 and let alone cutting it ! and trips to getting Home Depot wood...geez. $60 sounds reasonable from a finance point.
Yeah its proabbly cheaper DIY. tough call. I forget what I spent, but I'll never forget the first few panels taking out the ringing drywall sound! righteous..well worth it.

Blue Skys going back to the store? the Media model?

Oil Cans and Fagen prettyfhknggood imo...damn, your complaining?
I think artists are their worst enemy picking their stuff apart...IMO,
Apparently your comparing to some pro stuff, and thats cool...keep challenging and pushing yourself.
Anyway, Its good HR stuff.
Some think some mixing changes can be made, but thats not a monitor issue is it? I could imagine a few pans changing and some slider moves maybe.
 
Hey Cool, thanks for the kind words!

I'm a drummer first, but lately every band around here wants to play death metal and get signed...I've got a job and bills to pay, so I'm starting to fall into a mentor/producer role. I figure I may as well try this the right way.

The Blue Sky's are cool, I love the subwoofer, the tweets are good, and the midranges are pretty bad. They'd make good consumer reference monitors, but not main nearfields. Honestly they're even too laid back for even everyday listening...too laid back in the mids. And the BX8's are the polar opposite...way too forward in the mids to the point that it's fatiguing and I can't hear anything else.

So I'm torn between keeping the Blue Sky's and getting a pair of Auratones or similar speakers for mono/midrange listening or returning the Blue Sky's and saving up more cash (or building my own monitors). Especially if I go the latter route, I'd like to get some acoustic panels and get the room setup better.

Anyways, I'm trying to do a mix on the Blue Sky's but everything sounds so papery it's difficult. I'll keep trying to break them in and get used to them before I get anything up. I may just head over to Magnolia HiFi and see if they've got any of those Tivoli mono full-range clock radios and just go full board with this shootout. I really want one nasty mono-summed speaker and one set of full range (possibly 2.1) monitors.
 
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