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#1
10-09-2002, 07:27 AM
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Would you buy?
The more I've learned about mixing and recording the more I realize the final mix of an album is an excercise in compromise. You can mix somrting that sounds great in headphones, but awful on your stereo and vice versa.
Would you buy albums that were mixed specifically for headphones, and a different copy of the same album that was mixed for a car stereo? Just curious. David 
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#2
10-09-2002, 07:39 AM
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I think the compromise is pretty slim personally but maybe I don't have as much of an audiophile's ear that I used to. For whatever difference there is, I wouldn't be willing to spend the bucks twice.
There might be an audience for 'either or' but it would split the demographic. I think there would be a much bigger customer base for something that sounds good on both, even with the compromise. Derek
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#3
10-09-2002, 08:03 AM
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Re: Would you buy?
Quote:
So in a way, yes, I have purchased both a "stereo" mix and a "surround" multichannel mix!
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#4
10-09-2002, 08:08 AM
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Personally I think that if a recording sounds great on your
car stereo thewn it will almost always sound even better on good headphones because headphones allow the human ear to be dedicated to the music without outside noice polution and smaller more detailed frequencies tend to come out of the mix more through headphones: Ex: cymbols, drum beats, harmonics etc... If I had to pick I would mix for car/home audio listening. Headphones will only serve to enhance that mix even more.
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#5
10-09-2002, 08:30 AM
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This sort of thing has been tried before (ie. special binaural mic'ing with dummy heads, mixed to show well in headsets) and has typically been a financial flop for the record companies. Still and all, there are usually enough buyers to merit a short run pressing of some perennial favorites in any new format, vis a vis Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" in Quadraphonic and just about every format since that...
 Bob P.S. The basic deal with headphones is that you are listening to only one speaker with one ear. As you listen on a stereo you hear some from the opposite speaker into each ear, which collapses the stereo field to one degree or another. The result is that the entire mix, except absolutely centered stuff, appears to move way outboard when listened to in the 'phones. Of course, with headphones, high-end isn't attenuated by the air between the speaker and yourself as it is with a stereo, so everything is also more "present". You might be interested to know that the engineer for the Grateful Dead used to mix their stuff under headphones. Products mixed with headphones tend to bunch up toward the center. Car stereo has become the wild card in mixing. For auto audio, we used to mix to Auratone speakers, which were small, limited-range speakers because they gave us a mix which would work in most cars. These days, you've got everything from low-fidelity, low-wattage systems to nice, relatively flat systems, to those hyped response freaks of the industry which rattle your home's walls more than any jet's sonic boom ever did, and do it as they drive by thirty yards away.
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"It is said, 'Go not to the elves for counsel for they will say both no and yes.' " Frodo Baggins to Gildor Inglorion, The Fellowship of the Ring THE MUSICIAN'S ROOM (my website)
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#6
10-10-2002, 03:40 AM
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One trick I've used before is to go into a store that has tons of monitors and play your best at-home mixed CD on them all, take notes on each set of monitors, and make the proper adjustments back home.
I've done this at a chain store before. I played my CD on all manner of KK Audio monitors, Mackies, Yamahas, and anything else they had in there. I took into consideration the speaker sizes and general sound reproduction qualities of each. Obviously, a single, ported 6" enclosure will sound completely different than a two 15" w/ a 3" tweeter configuration. It's like a handicap scale for speakers. Basically, if I was happy with the way the songs sounded across the board, I wouldn't change anything. If the highs didn't really come across on the small 6's then I KNEW something was wrong. Likewise if the low end didn't come out on the larger setups, I knew what was needed. What ends up happening is the the music will sound as good as the system it's played on. I don't know if any of this is actually sound mixing practices, as per professional sound people, but it has worked for me quite well. -Mike A.
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......."these go to eleven." -NT
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#7
10-14-2002, 08:09 PM
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I used headphones for a long time and just couldn't get used to setting up my mix to sound differently than I wanted to hear it, for the sake of making the cd sound right through the livingroom stereo.
Once I got a set of decent monitors with an amp attached to my recorder, I started getting a truer response of what I was recording. I could set up the mix to sound how I wanted it to sound, and I got better cd's.
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