So guys I'm wondering what the magic formula that make your cd sound good in the car, hi-fi, boom/box etc. I seem to get a better sound if I leave my tracks raw with each having its own eq'ed sweet spot. Everytime I tried using one of those all ready made up mastering programs it sounds good in the moniters, but sounds different and often muddy in the car and boom box. How do you guys with your project studios approach mastering you cds for the best all around performance? Thanks Bruce

Hi buddy, sounds like a case of monitor/room environment to me.
Get a decent set of monitors if you don't already have some, then tackle that arduous task of acoustical treating the room.
Then when you can trust what you hear in your room you will have more confidence in your decisions with regards to eq, and pretty much anything you tweak.
If you already have good speakers then you might want to evaluate your listening environment and how your speakers are set up.
This is what i would do.

Cheers

What im trying to say there is, if your music sounds good in an honest room/monitor environment,
then it will travel very well.

quote:

How do you guys with your project studios approach mastering you cds for the best all around performance?

I know exactly what you're talking about and I've been dealing with it in spades on my latest project. The band's style is emo/pop and there are layered heavy guitars on almost every track. The problem is that on some systems, particularly a few cars and computers, it sounded muddy and boomy but on my on my mixing setup as well as my high end stereo, it sounded fine.

The singer in the band came up with a great theory. A lot of kids turn up the bass! I've rode in young person's cars and heard this over and over again. They will turn up the bass and often the treble. As for computers, the "sub" woofer has a nasty peak at about 150 hz that is designed to make it sound like real bassy.

We went back and compared the CD we were mixing and mastering to several commercial CDs and we realized that the big name CDs have a significant suckout at about 150 hz. A good example is Jimmy Eat World's Futures CD. Once you train your ears to hear it you'll recognize it immediately. Go back to an old Grateful Dead record and you won't hear that. Put a Dead CD in a car with the bass turned up and it sounds terrible.

Anyway, we went back and rolled off the low end of the guitars, eq'd the bass guitar differently, and eq'd the kick to remove some of the lows and presto! It sounds thinner than I would like on my monitors but it does better on cheap systems. Hope that helps....

yeh mixing heavy tunes can be a pain sometimes in regards to the low end.
You did the right thing though regards to cutting that boomy freq, it's hard though especially when mixing your own stuff to be totally impartial to the sound.
cheers,
Ged Leitch,
BitHead Mastering

Hi,
thats a very common prob on semi pro recordings.
A highend monitor and hifi would not match your needs with this one in all cases.
Be sure to cross listen with consumer gear alot. I.e. try damn crappy small low bandwidth 'radio' non hifi monitors as well as 'disco' type hifi ones (lots of bass and highs).
The elements of the song have to cut thru on every environment.
Alot of engineers using the NS-10 monitors swear they are so popular due to their *crappy* sound. (Like: If it works on these, it works everywhere...)
Take extreme care with using EQ on a final mix, be subtle and spare. If you can hear it without A/Bing it's probably too much...
A nice thing to have are psychoacoustic EQ's.
Most to be taken care of section is the mids. The more transparent they seem, the better. For these, use a damn flat monitor and make it sound well balanced. IMO bass and high end are much easier to adjust...
Don't try to get something out of it that *is not there*. This is the final stage of soundworks, concentrate on eliminating the worst flaws first. *After* that try if you can make it sound sweeter a bit ...
Don't concentrate on a special vision of sound except you *exactly* know what you are doing. Try to be open minded for the special track you are working on. There are lots of ways to make a track sound *good* or *pro*. Listen to some radio hits on flat monitors and you can be very surprised in which different ways they manage to sound good...
(for example jamiroquai sounds very densed in the mids, *not* very much in the highs and lows, very surprising, and next, compare to an actual madonna track: what a difference, deep, spacy and very hughe badwidth...if your monitor makes them sound the same get a new one. A simple flat sounding one like the active Behring*rs may already be all what you need. OK people, throw the stones on me )

I hope this can help a bit...

Kind regards

Martin

quote:

What im trying to say there is, if your music sounds good in an honest room/monitor environment,
then it will travel very well.

No. How do you figure that? Better speakers will make your songs sound better, so how would that help to campare with crappy systems(boom boxes,stock car stereos, and computer speakers).


Obviously eqing is the fix for this prob. I think better speakers would flee from the solution. Then again i use headphons when i mix. Really expensive monitors are meant to give an "exact sound" so would that help to hear your lows and mids well enough to not desire increasing them too much in relation for shitty stereos? If that's the case then yes i suppose a good pair of monitors would help. But then thats a lot of money for speakers when the problem can be fixed with some eqing/compression/mastering. Also if the monitors are good then they can handle more bass and have better sounding highs that a typical stereo

quote:

quote:
What im trying to say there is, if your music sounds good in an honest room/monitor environment,
then it will travel very well.



No. How do you figure that? Better speakers will make your songs sound better, so how would that help to campare with crappy systems(boom boxes,stock car stereos, and computer speakers).


Obviously eqing is the fix for this prob. I think better speakers would flee from the solution. Then again i use headphons when i mix. Really expensive monitors are meant to give an "exact sound" so would that help to hear your lows and mids well enough to not desire increasing them too much in relation for shitty stereos? If that's the case then yes i suppose a good pair of monitors would help. But then thats a lot of money for speakers when the problem can be fixed with some eqing/compression/mastering. Also if the monitors are good then they can handle more bass and have better sounding highs that a typical stereo

You need good monitors and a good room as well as good gear. To top it all off, you need to know what to do with it. Blind eq'ing won't cut it.

In my opinion you need
a. good ears
b. a pair of honest clean monitor (and in my opinion the underrated behringers can do a very good job here)
c a pair of customer style hifis (with overpronounced heights and basses)

The better the quality of the 'honest' monitors, especially in the mids, the better the possibility of getting a good 'radio compatible'mix...

Just my 2 eurocents...

Kind regards

Martin
PS: the yamahas you find in every mastering studio where considered 'crap' when they were introduced, but are exemplary for meeting customer audio gear *generally*.

quote:

Originally posted by scotty'spimpin:
(snip) ...Better speakers will make your songs sound better, so how would that help to campare with crappy systems(boom boxes,stock car stereos, and computer speakers).

No, that's *totally* the wrong train of thought.

Better speakers do NOT "make" anything sound better - They allow you to hear what the sound actually represents.

Great mixes on great monitors inherently translate well to other systems. That's the whole point to great monitoring.

Otherwise, as mentioned, you're working blind.

quote:

Originally posted by John Scrip:
No, that's *totally* the wrong train of thought.

Ah, I see. This is perhaps an obvious truth that has only now become obvious to me. Cool! Okay, I'll shut up now and listem some more!

While mixing and mastering, it is important to actually CUT the low-low frequencies. Roll off around 20-30 hz and you will find that this removes a lot of low information that you can't really hear but has the effect of fouling up your mixes.
While you're mixing, use a subwoofer to reference your mix against other CDs.
And get some good monitors! The Behringer Truth monitors are a stupid deal. They are totally useable and I have mixed and mastered using these as one of my monitor pairs!

Er... the Behringer Truths are incredibly hyped. Not even close to being flat. You can learn them but it will take a long time and a lot of work. There are better monitors out their at a low price point (Tannoys for example). Invest in a good monitor chain and you won't need a second set of speakers as you'll be able to hear what is going on in the first place.

One thing my kid brother did that changed my life!! He put a cd of his garage band that he made in (irony) Garageband in my DVD player and listened through the built in T.V. speakers while flashing back and forth to MTV. I do this all the time now, both through the TV speakers and the home theatre surround, just bouncing back and forth between tv programming and reference mix. Thanks Little Bro'!!