Skipping good monitors

M

Monkey

Cabin boy
I almost peed my pants when I saw someone advocate $1000 monitors to make sure you mixes sound good. I can't afford anything like that.

Now I don't know anything about mixing yet, but see if this makes sense: the purpose of using monitors is to make sure you mix will sound good when you pop it into the car or home stereo. So the ultimate test is your conventional stereo system.

In that case, why not burn a CD, go listen to it, adjust accordingly, and do it again? CDs are pretty cheap... I know this would be more time consuming, but it doesn't require you to sell your car just to get some fancy speakers. Heck, for that matter, you could just run RCA outs from your computer into your home stereo system and use IT to monitor. You just want it to sound good for the listener, right?

Does anyone want to heap derision on this idea? 3..2...1... GO!
 
Problem with that is you may find yourself going back to the tracking to get things right. A great guitar sound on your stereo might even sound good in a mix on your stereo but when you adjsut a sound by trial and error that way you are ignoring the original sound which may be miles from where you thought.

Decent flat monitors will be good in getting true sounds in tracking as well as mixing. Don't go crazy just get some speakers intended for this purpose. Some Alesis M1s or M-audios will do fine. You don't want to EQ a song from here to hell to get it to sound good, just to fix a little frequency clash here or there.
 
Just wait...one day you'll understand. Mixing with decent monitors is like...suddenly being able to hear for the first time.

You don't need to spend $1000...you can get a monitoring setup for half that.

Slackmaster 2000
 
monkey, your idea will work perfectly well if your goal is to make a CD that sounds great in your car. or any one particular set of speakers in a particular space.

some of us are trying to get mixes that sound good anywhere, and that's where your method falls down.
 
So then, the idea is to get mixes that sound good in most places... If you use some great-sounding monitors which, as I understand it, don't emphasize the lows or highs or middle but play everything about equally, the theory is that if your listeners then have stereos that are too heavy or light on one of those, at least they'll only be as bad as their own system and not making a strength or weakness you mixed in worse?

Is playing back highs, mids, and lows about equally what you mean by "flat" speakers?
 
That's part of it Monkey but it's not that simple. The speakers can be dead flat and still have certain characteristics that make them unacceptable for mixing.For instance most "flat" home or audiophile type speakers are only truly flat at a certain volume or with the ideal input impedence or amp. True studio monitors are very robust speakers that have large magnets and a long driver throw that doesn't distort at high volumes or even dull out at low volumes. When you hear flat it doesn't always mean they are good monitors. True through the gain range is more what you are after.

You should see the acrobatics a good set of monitors can withstand. Most home speakers would flub out or distort while I overdub guitar to a rock track, I know because I have a pair of hi-fi speakers I try to monitor with sometimes.
 
It should also be stressed that a "good" set of monitors are speakers that allow you to hear what you need to hear to create a good mix.

Monitors do not sound "good". I highly doubt that any monitor is truely "flat" either. Monitors do help you hear, however. A good monitor can be like a magnifying glass. A good monitor can make subtle problems that you might not always hear into huge blaring problems that you'll want to fix.

When I first got monitors I, like you, was unconvinced that they were necessary. I invested in a pair of cheap Event 20/20's and the second I plugged them in, oh man, I could hear! Suddenly there were reverb trails, drum squeaks, snare rattles, humming amplifiers, sloppy edits, etc etc!! I pulled up one of my mixes that seemed to play pretty well on my stereo and in the car, and holy smackers it sounded like garbage. Immediately there were dozens of things that needed fixing, and I didn't have to "squint" my ears to hear them. While I didn't hear these obvious problems when playing one of my mixes in the car, for instance, after fixing the problems the mix sounded BETTER in the car.

I also learned that the 20/20 doesn't have a lot of low end, so at first I did have a tendancy to over-do it (and perhaps still do at times). But what I've found now after learning these monitors is that they really force me to try to give the low end definition, which has slowly but surely been improving my mixes. I'm sure that every set of monitors has to be learned...as does every room.

At that time I didn't have a good power amp either. I was just using an old NAD integrated amplifier - underpowered and fairly colored, but a good sounding amp for home stereo use. Recently though I purchased a cheap Hafler TA1600 to power the 20/20's, and I was worried that I really wouldn't be able to hear the difference....man was I wrong. Suddenly the stereo field was THERE. I didn't hear "left monitor" "right monitor" I heard SPACE....vocals that really appear to come from straight ahead, guitars that off center and a little back, etc etc. Even my wife commented on the phenomenon without any coaching.

So don't be overly skeptical. You'll find monitors in every single studio in the world, and for good reason. I think it's a good thing to start on something like a home stereo so that you can appreciate the difference as you upgrade equipment....but someday you will own some monitors, trust me :)

My limted, amature opinion.

Oh, and I just re-read your original post. The reason you can't just go listen to a mix in the car, then run back into the house to make changes is....well...there are perhaps infinite reasons :) You might listen to your mix in a car and think, "man, too much lead guitar", so you go back home and you turn the guitar - which you thought sounded fine - down. But then you plop the mix into your home stereo and "aw man, there's not enough lead guitar!" So what is your problem? EQ, compression? Probably a mixture of the two...but you can't really hear what you need to do while your mixing, so you end up buring 1000 CD's running around listening to mixes in various locations and trying to make good decisions. Then you run into the brick wall. *Every time you adjust one sound in a mix, the rest of the mix sounds differently!* It's a MIX. What happens if you take some of the sweet out of your sweet & sour sauce? You've got sour sauce. Haha.

Slackmaster 2000
 
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