Always small sound in the prosumer speakers - now I know why...

[RainbowStorm]

Ever since I first setup my home studio I have been struggling with my sound. The problem has been that I've experienced a too small sound on prosumer speakers without as much instrument definition as I have tried to achieve. At first I blamed my RME Fireface 800 converter for it, but soon I realised it could not be due to that, besides it was very unlikely too. Then I went through my setup and looked for potential signal killers in the signal chain, I changed cables, did noise analysis etc. But I could not find anything in particular that would make the sound that much smaller. Then I started suspecting that I had monitoring problems, so I setup the main monitors differently. But it didn't help. I pretty much ended up blaming it all on my best synth, so I started recording with software synths and the sound improved, but it didn't become bigger. So then I thought what is it, WHAT IS IT?!!
That's when I started experimenting with limiters. I thought that maybe I'm simply not limiting my stuff in the right way or something. So I went through every single limiting technique out there and tried a lot of different limiters... Didn't help. Then I thought, damn, it can't be that hard to figure it out. Do I have a too high noise floor?! So then I started doing all these noise measurements, I analyzed everything from the connectors and pre amps on the Fireface to the cables, plug-ins etc etc. But I couldn't find anything in particular that seemed to be causing this problem. At that point I gave up. I just thought that my studio is too bad and I'd need to change everything in order to get what I want... After all testing and laborating with limiters and noise I first ended up oversensitive to sound, then I got Tinnitus. I have now rested for some months and this evening I felt like I wanted to return to the studio and see how it would feel.

I wanted a fresh start, so the first thing I did was to try make the whole studio much more professional. I removed the curtain from the window so that it wouldn't feel as much like a cave anymore. Then I thought that I need to sit a bit farther away from the speakers to not get more Tinnitus problems, so I moved the whole mixing desk about 1 - 1,5 m back. BINGO!!! When I turned on all the studio equipment I instantly noticed that everything I had been recording earlier was very cheap and small sounding... I just couldn't believe it! So the problem had always been that I was mixing with my studio monitors too close, so that was always why I never heard how small the sound actually was, because by mixing that close to the speakers everything was always really wide and powerful so I never knew how to compensate. So tonight I did a demo mix and I instantly noticed how I always had been mixing the center much too unbalanced. A lot of instruments that sounded good in the Tyros before now sounded really cheap and unusable. All kinds of things got reveiled... Almost all drum kits were quite bad actually. I couldn't find a single bass preset good enough so I found an electric piano to be more useful. All the accoustic pianos were crap now, not usable. But presets I didn't find good sounding before now all of a sudden were better sounding than before. Soon the mix was done and this time it had some BALLS too!

[chetatkinsdiet]

...and of course anytime anyone that's sort of a newbie asks questions about gear, etc and someone replies to them to spend the money on the room first, they get overlooked. It's just not as sexy to purchase foam and bass traps as it is a new mic pre. Heck, you didn't have to spend any money, just move things around and experiment a bit. Imagine what some real room treatments and a great set of monitors would do? It's not rocket science to do this stuff, but if you aren't hearing it correctly, then you're work is always skewed.

m

[stellar]

wow...that was a great story. I am sorry to hear you had tinnitus but glad that it got better. I have had a similar problem where my center instruments vs the panned stuff has been all out of balance...I figured that maybe the speakers are in the wrong position but since everything looks ok I haven't really done anything about it...so two questions for you. 1 - how far away did you eventually put the speakers from you and how far apart from each other are they? and 2 - was the problem the distance or that they were cheap speakers? it sounds like you are blaming the speakers for being cheap but the problem was actually their positioning?

[Kiwiburger]

Monitoring too loud is certainly dangerous.

I am not at all convinced you have solved your problems. When you say that you now prefer the sound of an electric piano for bass, and dislike all your bass sounds - I really suscpect you have gone from bad to worse.

By monitoring with your near field speakers further away, you are now hearing more room sound. Unless you have analysed and treated you room, I expect this will be full of room node anomalies that will be seriously clouding your judgement. Room sound can play havoc with bass - boosting some notes and cutting others. If you haven't invest in bass trapping, the muddy low end sound will be boomy and seriously misrepresent.

To a point where you might even prefer an electric piano keyboard bass to your good bass samples ... perhaps.

Tony/Rainbow - you must have read hundreds of posts on monitoring by now. You must remember that many, many people have reminded you to always compare your music with commerical mixes.

There is a basic fact of monitoring that you have to learn early on. What you hear from your speakers is not necessarily what anyone else will ever hear from their speakers. The goal is to make portable mixes. And that means understanding the weaknesses of your monitor system and compensating for them. You basically don't listen to your speakers - you listen through your speakers. You learn to make good mixes despite your speakers.

I really hope you are solving your problems. But whatever you do, compare, compare, compare your mixes against commercial stuff frequently. And often.

If - for example - you come to the conclusion that all commercial mixes are crap, and only your mixes have great bass - I can assure you that you would be wrong. If you find - for example - that commercial mixes have a very weak bass on your system - then guess what? Your goal is to make mixes that have weak bass too! Because you would be realising that your monitors and room are wrong, and therefor you have to mix just like the commercial stuff to sound right on the majority of other systems.

Hope that helps.

Also - one reason why a mix might sound small on small speakers is because it lacks harmonics. This is this desirable distortion i've been harping on about for some time. For example - you can make a sinewave bass that sounds acceptable on a huge sub woofer system. You will definatly feel the bass. But - on a small speaker that can't reproduce that low, you won't hear much at all. But if you distort this (and i'm not talking fuzz box or anything - the euphonic distortion of tubes, tape, transformer or digital emulations thereof) you add harmonics, which are frequencies that will be heard on small speakers.

FWIW.

[A101]

Another interesting read on the subject

[MATTI]

Har-Bal is a good helper.
Matti

[RainbowStorm]

Originally Posted by Kiwiburger

Monitoring too loud is certainly dangerous.

I am not at all convinced you have solved your problems. When you say that you now prefer the sound of an electric piano for bass, and dislike all your bass sounds - I really suscpect you have gone from bad to worse.

By monitoring with your near field speakers further away, you are now hearing more room sound. Unless you have analysed and treated you room, I expect this will be full of room node anomalies that will be seriously clouding your judgement. Room sound can play havoc with bass - boosting some notes and cutting others. If you haven't invest in bass trapping, the muddy low end sound will be boomy and seriously misrepresent.

To a point where you might even prefer an electric piano keyboard bass to your good bass samples ... perhaps.

Tony/Rainbow - you must have read hundreds of posts on monitoring by now. You must remember that many, many people have reminded you to always compare your music with commerical mixes.

There is a basic fact of monitoring that you have to learn early on. What you hear from your speakers is not necessarily what anyone else will ever hear from their speakers. The goal is to make portable mixes. And that means understanding the weaknesses of your monitor system and compensating for them. You basically don't listen to your speakers - you listen through your speakers. You learn to make good mixes despite your speakers.

I really hope you are solving your problems. But whatever you do, compare, compare, compare your mixes against commercial stuff frequently. And often.

If - for example - you come to the conclusion that all commercial mixes are crap, and only your mixes have great bass - I can assure you that you would be wrong. If you find - for example - that commercial mixes have a very weak bass on your system - then guess what? Your goal is to make mixes that have weak bass too! Because you would be realising that your monitors and room are wrong, and therefor you have to mix just like the commercial stuff to sound right on the majority of other systems.

Hope that helps.

Also - one reason why a mix might sound small on small speakers is because it lacks harmonics. This is this desirable distortion i've been harping on about for some time. For example - you can make a sinewave bass that sounds acceptable on a huge sub woofer system. You will definatly feel the bass. But - on a small speaker that can't reproduce that low, you won't hear much at all. But if you distort this (and i'm not talking fuzz box or anything - the euphonic distortion of tubes, tape, transformer or digital emulations thereof) you add harmonics, which are frequencies that will be heard on small speakers.

FWIW.

Thanks for all your advice! BTW, my studio is rather small. I'll describe the thing in more detail. I have always compared my mixes with commercial mixes, especially with my reference song. So typically I have been mixing and comparing the sound with my reference song to get a good picture of the difference. Then I've burned this on CD and listened in a prosumer environment and compared the two mixes in that environment as well.

The strange thing has always been that even though my sound in the studio has been very close to the commercial sound in terms of balance the difference has always been that in the prosumer environment my mixes have been very "small" in comparison. Of course some of this is due to the fact that real instruments are used in the reference song (I'm using a keyboard) and the amplification I'm sure is much better too (might be due to the lack of harmonics as you pointed out Kiwiburger), but nonetheless, by moving the speakers farther away I could hear the present frequencies better, it started sounding more like in the prosumer environment and that's why I'm now able to hear this in the studio and be able to compensate, since I feel that my studio sound is not giving a good picture of how it actually sounds. So it's not only a balance thing, it also helps me recognise what frequencies are actually there when the mix itself is as balanced as the reference song. The piano for instance was really "small" and unnatural sounding, but by sitting closer to the speakers it was like the piano had more resonance and was quite natural sounding, which in my opinion is not really the true picture of that instrument, I've always noticed how bad the piano really is in the prosumer environment but never really in the studio. Another problem has been the center, it has always been very cloudy. But now I could hear in a completely different way how I had always had a very unbalanced center, for instance the drums and the melody were not in balance and not loud enough, something that is quite difficult to hear when you are comparing your mix with the reference song and you are sitting close to the studio monitors. By getting the center right I now also got a larger sounding snare drum that was not as cheesy sounding anymore, simply by better knowing what snare drum to use and how loud it should be.

To some degree I agree about still not having solved all my monitoring problems, it's very unlikely since I haven't done any special accoustic treatment to the room, so for instance the bass is of course not what it would be in a studio with bass traps etc. But I'm able to get really pleasant low frequencies in the studio when I record such frequencies, so at least I'm able to hear these frequencies in the room. In order to get such harmonics from my artificial bass source I need to be very selective with what bass sound I record and then process it in a certain way. It is not something that my keyboards can deliver just out of the box.

So my conclusion about all this is that this is exactly what you want to experience and be able to get information about in your own studio. It's much easier to understand the importance of the monitoring environment by experiencing stuff like this. I have now learned that it is not only the gear and the engineer skills that determine the final sound quality, soon engineers come to a point when the gear is there and the skills are there, but there is simply no room for it all to really shine on a record... This is really the most basic decision making trap that exists. By not knowing what the most important thing is you end up spending on the wrong things. For this reason I can only imagine why some studios are so popular even though the equipment used seems quite common. Combining a really good mixing monitoring environment with a really good mastering monitoring environment and then put skillful engineers in the middle of it all to master the full potential out of these resources, that must of course end up sounding pretty good in comparison...

What I find the most interesting about all this is how not only the wall material, the room size and the quality of the monitors determine the quality of the monitoring environment, but also how engineer<->speaker distance as well as speaker angle and speaker L<->R distance can play a very important role in setting the standard of the monitoring quality once the room itself and the monitors are good. I'm a little surprised that I've read a lot of mixing books but few seem to have pointed out the importance of speaker<->engineer distance good enough. I also want to point out that my monitors have been about 0,5 - 1 m above my ears (which is because the wall didn't have support for putting them lower), so by moving back they have come down a little as well.

These are the current specs:

I'm now mixing with the monitors in a triangle with 1,5m on every side of the triangle. So the speaker L<->R distance as well as speaker L/R<->engineer ears distance is 1,5m. The speakers (Mackie HR 824 near-field monitors) are laying on the wall on top of a wall shelf. The wall, roof and floor material is wood and I have a carpet and a leader chair in the room. The room is about 3m in depth, so I'm currently mixing exactly in the center of the room with the speakers on the long wall. By mixing at that position the monitors are something like 20-30cm above my ears and they are laying down with the treble speaker towards the center. The angle is such that the speakers don't point exactly at my ears, but slightly on the outside of my ears (by purpose to avoid the signal getting straight into my ears), with an angle of something like 20-30 degrees. The room is full of stuff. (it's packed, I have about 11 other speakers in the room, in wood matieral, guitars, an organ and three synths plus 3 stereos as well as all the studio equipment) This stuff has in my opinion improved the accoustic sound rather than made it worse. I was not very impressed about the sound of all that wood material, it was very sharp sounding at first but now I think the sound is ok. The heavy carpet on the floor as well as the leader chair made a huge difference.

[Kiwiburger]

Filling a room with stuff actually does help the acoustics a lot. It provides random diffusion and bass trapping - all those speakers will be absorbing bass, and any wood panels too.

I second the suggestion for www.har-bal.com - the Harbal demo alone is very useful for analysing and comparing your work visually. There are plenty of seasoned professionals who will rant on about how unnecessary this is - but they already have excellent rooms and years of experience. Harbal is a great learning tool, and I only use it as a spectrum analyser. I don't suggest eq'ing your mix with Harbal, although if you need an eq it's not a bad one.

You might want to wire up some of those small speakers for checking your mix as you go - instead of waiting until you've burned a CD. I believe Bob Katz uses small Apple speakers for checking mixes.

[Cojo]

I think mixing to close to the monitors would be like mixing in headphones, and we all know how difficult that can be!?

I can also recomed you (if you not have done it yet) to place the monitors so they are at equal distance from any walls! It makes a great improvement, especially if your room is untreated.

/Cojo

[Lupo]

>The room is about 3m in depth, so I'm currently mixing exactly in the center of the room with the speakers on the long wall.

This'll place you in a bass null that'll suck out all energy from about 57 and 114 hz. (speed of sound divided by lenght). Try a sine sweep, these frequencies is probably way down in level. You're already stuck in the center between the L/R walls to achieve proper stereo imaging, no need to place yourself in two nulls.

>I can also recomed you (if you not have done it yet) to place the monitors so they are at equal distance from any walls!

Did you intend to write unequal? Equal distance from side/rear/ceiling walls will give twice or thrice the trouble as all lenghts reinforce the same frequency. But if you meant to set them so they're symmetrical in the L/R stereo field, I'm with ya. :)


Cheers,

Andreas

[Cojo]

Originally Posted by Lupo

>The room is about 3m in depth, so I'm currently mixing exactly in the center of the room with the speakers on the long wall.

This'll place you in a bass null that'll suck out all energy from about 57 and 114 hz. (speed of sound divided by lenght). Try a sine sweep, these frequencies is probably way down in level. You're already stuck in the center between the L/R walls to achieve proper stereo imaging, no need to place yourself in two nulls.

>I can also recomed you (if you not have done it yet) to place the monitors so they are at equal distance from any walls!

Did you intend to write unequal? Equal distance from side/rear/ceiling walls will give twice or thrice the trouble as all lenghts reinforce the same frequency. But if you meant to set them so they're symmetrical in the L/R stereo field, I'm with ya. :)


Cheers,

Andreas

Ha, ha... yeah, sorry! I ment symetrical, ie. same distance from sidewalls, another same distance from frontwall etc.

I also agree that it's no good to sit exactly in the middle of the room.

/Cojo

[RainbowStorm]

Thanks for your advice! Currently I'm not able to move my desk from the center of the room since the room is too small for that. But I think I'm actually not sitting exactly in the center of the room when I'm mixing, it's more like 1/3 of the back wall distance more back from the center. My desk is in the center, but the desk is actually quite big so I'm not sitting exactly in the center myself. I think the room is not exactly 3m in depth, I think it's a little under that, maybe something like 2,8m. If I'm sitting even closer to the wall the bass dramatically increases, but in my opinion that doesn't give me a fair picture of the actual sound. But sometimes I step back and have a listen closer to the wall to get another picture of what's really there...

Honestly, I think my current studio configuration is the best so far. It sounds great where I'm mixing but it also reveils a lot of new interesting things, so it's easy to know what's there. Of course I would like to have a better environment and better monitors, but for me this seems to work now...!

[Kip]

Hi guys,

I learnt quite a bit from reading this post and thought that if i could seek some advise from you guys. Im currently in the midst of converting my room to a small workplace for my mixing and recording. My current room setup is as such in the attachment. I'll be removing the queen size bed definetly probably make do with sleeping on the floor and of course the mirror closet, however i would have problems removing the wardrobe as there are no other places where i can move it to. its a pretty small room and i've noted down the dimensions. The big red cross is where i think its the best place to work at with the two smaller red crosses where my monitors will be. Any thoughts about how i can improve? Much appreciate any help in advance. Thanks.


kip

[Kip]

Anyone?

[uncle duncan]

All the stuff I read about famous mix engineers says they generally mix at low volume on small speakers, and only crank it up to check bass. Tinnitus is an indication of permanent hearing damage, caused by excessive volume. If mixing loud makes you happy, enjoy it while you can, because before you know it, all you're going to be hearing is the ringing in your ears, and then you'll have to pay someone else to mix your tracks. But, at least, then they'll sound good, so that's the upside to ruining your hearing.

[peeder]

I would keep the bed in place, lure a wealthy romantic partner into it, and have them spoil you with a proper working environment.

(Of course, there's no way of telling how old you are on this thing, so please ignore that if you're just a kid...)

[theblue1]

Yup... sounds like you were monitoring too loud, all right.

First clue: tinnitus


One of the things my elders tried to drum into my head way back when was to not mix loud. And to periodically check my mixes at lower levels.

You turn the CR level up when the whole band is in there and you want to impress them.

But mix at a reasonable, consistent level. (Some folk even use sound pressure level meters in order to keep the level consistent as they mix, since the ear responds radically differently to the same sound at different levels.)

[T9c]

To be fair, he coulda gotten the Tinnitus from other means besides mixing too loudly.

Tinnitus can manifest itself in many different ways. Mine is a ringing, mostly on the left side that is about as high freq as hats, so I have to be very careful when mixing. But, I can always ask someone if they are balanced.