How do you judge the quality of a recording?

Recording, Mixing and Producing
#21

I’ve heard great stuff about Sonarworks but have not tried it myself. For the prices they offer, I’d send them your headphones and have them calibrate them for you. It’s affordable enough to try for sure.

Yeah, for me…close mic situations have always taken care of reflective rooms. Mixing in them can be difficult at times but if you close up the space you have a good chance of survival. Meaning…keep the distance between the monitors short and your distance away from them the same.

Some people spread out their monitors too far and sit too far away from them. That is where a bad room can get you.

One other thing to watch with headphones that gets lost…pan fields. What sounds great in cans can sound disconnected on real speakers. Hard pans can separate your music from itself if you’re not careful. This is one thing that is over accentuated in cans. We love the spread…but at times, in certain situations, the further apart the instruments are, the looser the mix. I like to have a happy medium and try to keep special effects for hard pans.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you NOT to pan hard…I’m just saying, the greatest mixes will always be the ones that are a tight unit without being too spaced out.

Which brings me to one last point…space. People misunderstand space for size. Stereo images, hard pans and extreme stereo effects appear to make a sound bigger. They widen the sound due to the stereo imaging taking place. The sound doesn’t actually grow at all and if one is not careful, you can actually get phasing. All this stuff can sound great in cans but can really mud up and congest a mix in no time.

Large instruments need large capture. Good mics, good room, several mics strategically placed to enhance the instrument and each other…stuff like that gives you a large sound. Everything else…just spaces it out. Space out in cans, it’s usually too much.

Try that SONAR works thing sneer us know what you think. Best of luck. :slight_smile:

#22

I have the Waves NX program too. It is good for making the soundstage a little closer to what it would sound like through speakers, but unfortunately it doesn’t do anything for correcting the eq differences, so I rarely use it. If you get a chance, turn it on and off while you are listening through speakers, and you’ll hear what it’s actually doing.
Calibrating headphones is really tricky unless the software is designed for specific headphones. The other important factor to consider is the difference in distance when using speakers vs. headphones, which is part of the cause of the panning being difficult in phones. Your brain pinpoints sounds by calculating the difference in distance from one ear to the other, and mixes in the environment too. With cans directly on your ears there is no environment and really no difference in distance. So, you can calibrate headphones pretty accurately to take out peaks and dips in the drivers, but good room calibration also takes into account the reflections and timing of how specific frequencies travel in the room to create nulls and buildups, and corrects for that as well as possible. Software keeps getting better and cheaper, but in the not too distant past the entry point for anything worthwhile was a ton of dough. None of this stuff is really all that complicated, but unfortunately as every smartass engineer will tell you, “you can’t fight physics”, so you have to fight the war with whatever you can come up with.

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#23

Yeah Styles, that SONAR works program literally sells calibrated cans or they can custom do your own. They also have a program with the most common headphone curves built in…but that would be like using Antares mic modeler…unless they modeled your mic, it’s not going to be as accurate. When they model your pair of cans, it’s supposed to make a huge difference. None of my buds close by have it so I can check it out, but quite a few have been praising it for s while now.

#24

I have the Sonarworks headphone calibration thing. @ptalbot very kindly gifted me the plugin recently. I have a set of Sennheiser HD 650 cans, which are really comfortable mixing headphones, but are definitely not “flat” in their frequency response. I haven’t yet had the courage to try an entire mix with them, (as I am pretty reliant on the sound of my studio monitors after using the same setup for the past 10 years or so) although I do keep threatening myself to try it! I have tried half a mix with them, and it came out pretty well.

That said, I know Patrick @ptalbot mixes his own music (pretty much exclusively) on the same cans with the aid of Sonarworks calibration, and his mixes are really excellent, so it can be done…

Back to the question @Cristina originally asked about the quality of recorded tracks… My suggestion would be to find a way to compare your raw multi-tracks with some that have been recorded by experienced, professional engineers in good studio spaces. It’s basically the same principle as mix-referencing, but with raw tracks. It’s a very wise move, IMO, because even if it does nothing else, it will help you gain confidence in your recording abilities. Certainly, if you’re trying to kick a goal, it helps to know which direction the goal posts are in.

These days, that isn’t as difficult as it used to find this type of material. For example: Warren Huart is an established producer/engineer who runs “Produce Like a Pro” and makes available multitracks for anyone to download free, that he has recorded in some of the best studios around LA:


There are quite a few other places around the web where you can download professionally recorded multitrack files to compare with your own work.

Obviously, doing as much as is practical to mechanically avoid noise in your recordings is the first port of call.

However, if you still have problems with sporadic, unavoidable noise getting into your recordings, one safety net (albeit a quite expensive one) available is the Izotope RX suite of spectral audio repair tools: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/repair-and-edit/rx.html

These are very powerful tools that are used all the time by professional film and TV post-production houses, where noise removal is an essential part of what they need to do to get a great final product. Again, I know @ptalbot relies on these at times, as he is in a similar situation to the one you describe.

… & finally, just keep at recording and mixing. By the sound of things, you’re already doing really well - If you love it and persist at it, you WILL progress and continue to progress and improve as the years go by. Hope that helps!

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#25

I should check this out then, cause I’m currently sort of limited to this way of working, and I have the same cans.

#26

hi there,

After reading through this i thought id try Solarworks last night; i have been using ARC2 for room reference for a long time now, but have seen SW. Danny thankfully helped originally with some advise on setting up ARC2 correctly back on RR.

My initial thought from last night is that SW is pretty dam good, i’m thinking of jumping ship now …ouch on the credit card.

I also tried the headphones plugin for my HD650 (never really liked mixing on them, more for reference of delay/reverb etc) with their HD650 template and i gotta say i was impressed (Way better then i thought it would be, actually quite enjoyable to listen to),id be interested how a song translates out of my studio now, that will be the clincher. If their calibrated option does an even better job then it would be a great way to go if you noise issues or you arenot in a position to set a room up. Id be interested if anyone has headphones calibrated and the outcome. Hell i might even do it before too long!.

I shall run it for 21 days trial and see i i still like it at the end, but so far it looks promising.

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