From Kim Lajoies Blog
[url]http://kimlajoie.wordpress.com/author/kimlajoie/[/url]
[quote]t seems a common problem people have with their mixes is translation. That is, their mixes don’t translate well between different playback systems. A mix might sound great on one system, but awful on another. Just because your mix sounds great in your studio doesn’t mean it’ll sound great everywhere!
Often, people are advised to overcome this by listening to their mixes on a variety of playback systems – in the studio, in the home cinema, on the bedroom alarm clock, in the car, at the club, etc. This can be useful, but it’s quite time-intensive. You have to render the mix and put it on an iPod or CD and take notes on what you think might need fixing. And you need to keep repeating the process until either you get the mix right, you can’t figure out what else is wrong or you get tired of listening to your crappy mix over and over again.
Another approach you might want to consider is to focus on your own monitoring environment. This requires two activities: improving your monitoring environment, and knowing your monitoring environment.
If you’re serious about mixing, you need to be serious about your monitoring environment. You need to understand that your monitoring environment is more than just your speakers and that improving it is more than just buying better speakers. Your monitoring environment consists of all your playback devices and their acoustic surroundings. For a studio, this will consist of the space, speakers and headphones. Improving the monitoring environment doesn’t necessarily mean getting better versions of what you already have. It might mean adding a second (or third) pair of speakers. Or adding some good headphones. Or investing in acoustic treatment. To make these kinds of decisions, however, requires that you understand your monitoring environment and appreciate the way the different components interact.
Having a great monitoring environment is necessary, but not sufficient. To use it effectively, you need to know what it does to music. You need to know how to use it. Doing this is easy – simply listen to a lot of music! Listen through your full-range speakers. Listen through your small speakers. Listen through your headphones. Listen in different positions in your room. Listen to different artists, different styles, different sounds. The more you do this, the better you’ll be at gaining an intuitive sense for what ‘sounds right’ in the space. It is this intuitive sense that will guide you in your own mixes.
I’ll leave you with one question: Does your music really need to sound good everywhere? What are some circumstances where it might not need to sound good everywhere?[/quote]