My mix down sounds great in my near fields but sound like junk in my home stereo WHY?

Z

Zad

New member
When I finished getting my mix to sound the way i wanted to ,that includes effects and eq. Then i export it to my hard drive, then from there to my CD burner then i burn it . Then when i put it on my home stereo it comes out bad , real bad , like that's not the way i wanted to represent the songs. And it's not what it sounds like on my near field monters the tonal quailties changed. When i here it, on my home stereo theres too much bass, not enough mid- range , the highs are thin, too much verb and the whole mix sounds like it's in the mud. Muddy. I record all my audio 44khz/16 bit and burn it that way to of course. And no matter how i eq my home stereo it doesnt help much .

HOW DO I GET MY MIX TO SOUND ON A HOME STEREO SIMLUAR TO WHAT I HAVE ON MY NEAR FIELDS??? I know this is your guys area of expertize and i think you guys can really help me out here. Thanks for you time and care Zadokk@aol.com
 
of course they don't sound the same, because your house speakers are not studio monitors. they are not built to be flat.

having said that, i can't for the life of me understand why you would hear more reverb on your house speakers unless the speakers are cutting some frequency that would otherwise overshadow the frequencies where the reverb lies.

what you need to do is take a CD in your genre of an artist/producer/engineer you respect and listen to how it sounds in your monitors and your house speakers.

make a note of the differences... on paper not just in your head.

then get a frequency analyzer... i use brainspawn's SpectR-Pro ($50) directx. put a couple of tracks from the CD into your sequencing software and take a look at them and then take a look at your stuff, and note the differences... on paper not just in your head.

now take a look at the difference between what you see on the spec analyzer and what you hear with your ears/brain.

oh, and cut some of that reverb out...
 
Zad,
Have you listened to your mixes on other systems besides your home set-up? Does it sound that way in your car. for instance? It sounds to me like your monitors are lacking bass so you're over compensating. What monitors are you using?
 
What kind of volume levels are you using to monitor your mixes on the nearfields?

Generally, you need to monitor at fairly loud levels just so you don't add in too much bass.
Normally, I actually wind up rolling off a little of the low end.

I have always used the nearfields for setting basic levels; and for stereo imaging after I use larger speakers for actual EQ'ing.

If you monitor on small speakers, and at lower levels, most of the time you'll wind up with too much bass.


Tim
 
MY system and learing more about mixing

I have the alesis moniter ones and i have the ra-100 amp to match them so everthing there is consitant and my audio card is a delta 10-10 ,all quailty stuff. After my last post ,I want to thank every one who replied,

I went and read some more on mixing
and hearing that most people generaly put too much reverb in their mix and mix at high sound levels .With this knowledge I went back to my recording took out the verb ,which the recoding was done in a room already with my Audio Technica AT 822 stereo condenser mic and dat machine in font of the speaker. So the room already has a slight effect on it anyways so i could reduce the amount of verb . Then I turned down the volume and started to listen to everything in detail and i did hear the mids flat ,that the reverd made the acustic gitaur boom and bottom out the mix , and just too much bass so that also came out to .
I kinda under stand now that in a mix a person need to have a predetermined idea of what they want to stick out as lead insturment. That could be singer , lead gituar, what ever , sointhis mix i needed the vocals to stand out and then have backing vocals stand out then the music. So I did one song and i need to finish 5 more and will let you guys know how it turns out . And since i have very little power over what went into the mix ,remember just one mic, no seprerate channels it will be amazing it comes out way i like .Zadokk@aol.com
 
I have little mixing experience myself, but the best advice I recieved that I can pass along to you is to get a professionally mixed and mastered CD and find a way to play it through your monitoring system.

I did this with a couple of songs from Rammstein's Mutter album because I liked how powerful it sounded. When I played it through my monitor system, Behold! It sounded weaker than any of my mixes. The whole time I was trying to compensate for the weak low end on my monitoring system when I didnt need to. If you kind of know the differences between your monitors and home stereo (which I am still trying to learn) then you can mix your songs to sound good on other systems without too much trial and error.

The goal is to make a mix that sounds good on systems that the average listener will be using to listen to your music. If it doesnt sound the way you want it to on your monitors dont worry about it. Guys that are really good at mixing are kind of like translators. They can hear a mix through studio monitors and translate it into "home stereo" language in their head, and they know that the home stereo will autimatically add little flavorings of its own that he wont need to add when mixing. Look at Rammstein's CD. It has one of my favorite mixes of all time and it sounds terrible through my monitor system.
 
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