How to test a mix to know if it will translate well?

You could use cans.

Thatā€™s what Iā€™ve always used, knowing my room works against me. At least they are consistently inaccurate.

I agree with everything you say, sadly I canā€™t stop worrying. I mix for games, so my tracks are played in a number of speakers: cellphones, notebooks, small computer mono and stereo speakersā€¦ Anyway, thanks for the useful information about mixes before the dinos :smiley:

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Everything is inaccurate. It all boils down to whether you can utilise whatever you have at your disposal to your consistent advantage.

Totally understand, but I think your goal would be to find a monitoring system that averages all that out for you. As AJ says, once you know what your system really sounds like, you should be confident that your mix will translate properly. If games are your reference point, you need to know what your monitors do to enhance or detract from what a gamer expects to hear and make them work. You canā€™t really chase down all the variables of all the crappy playback systems out there, but you can learn your monitors to the point that you are confident in your results.

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I just read through the thread again and thought about this a bit more. Can you describe some commonalities of how a game should sound vs. music? The thread concentrates a lot on the importance of your room and your familiarity with your monitors, but you mention you still feel worried. Maybe you should try going in the opposite direction: mix it for earbuds and your laptop first, then make enhancements in small increments until your real monitors sound good without it falling apart on your laptop speakers. Save and rename each mix with a new name and compare each one and the steps you took along the way.
You mentioned that you were hearing distortion on the crappy speakers but not on your monitor mix. That might be as simple as overdriving the tiny amp and thimbles you were listening on, compared to your real system. That could also mean that you need to limit the dynamic range on your gamer mix (compression and limiting) more than you would on a decent system.
To simplify things, crappy speakers have limited frequency response and lots of variance in how even the crappy response is across the range. That would mean you shouldnā€™t try to compensate by boosting the eq in areas the speaker canā€™t reproduce; all that energy turns into further distortion of the signal. You can experiment with high and low pass filters to get a feel for what the small speakers can and canā€™t do, and then compare with your real monitors. From there you might find a happy medium where the monitors havenā€™t been thinned out too much on the low end or dulled too much on top. Once you start hearing what that needs to be, youā€™ll have a pretty good baseline on what your monitors need to sound like for laptop speakers to sound decent too.
Sorry to be so long-winded, just trying to help. The question you are asking has a million variables, many of which are only solved by experience. Trust me, Iā€™ve had the unfortunate experience of thinking Iā€™ve nailed something only to hear it fall apart on a different system. If your system is reasonably good, you can learn the nuances of how to shape it to your advantage. Everyone on here has gone through the same thing.

Good idea, I started doing this yesterday.
Thatā€™s the result of mixing with my phone and then my monitors, Iā€™m really happy with the results:

Thatā€™s the result using just the monitors:

(I did some changes in the arrangement since it would make it translate better (at least as far as I tested with my commercial speakers))

As about how game music should sound, I think it just needs to sound clear, without resonances, without phase problems and so on, since it could (i think) cause problems with in-game sounds and, as said, problems in small speakers.

Now that I think about it, maybe the real problem was lack of experience since the result mixing with my phone sounds even better in anything IMO.

Thanks for the long explanation, Iā€™ll test the tips about small speakers

I havenā€™t read everything, apologies if I am missing the point but I just listened to your 2 last mixes and it is pretty obvious to me that you have a serious monitoring issue. Your first mix made on phone sounds great and the second one made only on your monitors is quite off with lots or resonances, sharp peaks and cuts on narrow frequency ranges. That is what leads me into thinking that you have a monitoring issue, which is likely to be caused more by the acoustics of your room than the quality of your monitors. A short-term, non-ideal workaround is to mix with a good headset.

Also, it sounds to me as if you have made a lot of EQ adjustments on the second mix while the first one sounds like there is little EQ going on. If this is indeed the case, you have one piece of the solution.

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Actually, both have a lot of eq, multi-band compression and so on. I guess you right, the problem is the monitor, but I also think it could be my lack of experience.

Find a simple visual program like Voxengo and a tone generator. Free plugs are readily available. Play the tone generator, or white noise through your monitors into a relatively flat mic positioned at your mixing position. Voxengo has a free spectrum analyzer that can show you, at least at a very simple level, the peaks and dips your monitors give you in the room. You can place an eq on your output channel to correct the problems a little, allowing your monitors to behave a little better. Keep in mind you need to spend a lot of money to do this properly, but knowing your monitors have a big dip at 4K would for instance show you why you might be over boosting at that frequency, causing your mixes to be spiky in the top end. Sometimes having a visual cue as to where the dips and peaks are helps your ears to identify the frequencies you need to fix. A tone generator can play specific frequencies one at a time at the same level. If your monitors are louder or quieter on any particular one you can compensate with eq to flatten them out. All of this can help, but it can also take you down a huge rabbit hole, so have fun.

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Ok try this, taken from your phone mixā€¦

Translation is all about the mid range. Make sure all of your instruments including kick and bass have some representation in the midrange. Make sure you have good separation in the mid range. Its not easy but that is the key.

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Good points-- and welcome to the forum! :slight_smile:

Mono is very back ā€¦ thanks to Amazon echo and the likesā€¦ and its important to get the stereo mixes to sound good in mono. Landr just did a decently helpful video


ā€¦ seriously whats up with 1:51 ? lol
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It did invoke a sensory/imagery emphasis on ā€œwetā€, I think that was his intention. Maybe he designed it on purpose in the first place, or decided in editing to toss an out-take in there. I think thatā€™s a clever trick, it breaks the concentration and the ā€œtranceā€ and gets your attention so you re-focus on the video. To me itā€™s kind of like psycho-acoustics in audio - it makes the mind perk up and ask ā€œWhat the hell was that?ā€ It did seem to work on you. :slightly_smiling_face: It worked on me too, though your comment did kind of prepare me for it.

I think thatā€™s a good point. Those devices are more and more popular, and the average listener doesnā€™t think about stereo - or care about it that much - most likely.

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Interesting. Iā€™m gonna have to mess around with that. Iā€™m glad he illustrated in the second half what he was describing in the first half. Helpful. Thanks for this, Michelle.

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Maybe. I doubt that labels and engineers are going to re-open millions of projects from the past and re-mix them for mono, so for the most part, people will still be listening to stuff that was specifically recorded to be played back in stereo.

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I think a lot of it is being used to your monitoring be in speakers or headphones and after a while your ears just lock on to what you know is right and no more going to the car. Continually listening to reference tracks through your monitors .I find it hard work mixing or mastering to a reference but i have found it pays off 10 fold when i do .

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I have a pretty nice listening system; Martin Logan electrostatic speakers and subwoofer, upper end Yamaha receiver. I worked in the industry and got great deals on everything, but even so, itā€™s probably $4k worth of equipment.
When my wife wants to listen to music she talks to Alexa.
I hope real audio stays alive.
Mono translation is important, but referencing through a real system is the reason we spend so much time on the recording itself.

I mix in mono a lot of the time now.I was doing a mix in stereo today and flipped to mono and the guitars were ni on gone and that was basic tracks with no widening or anything .Mono is great for placing things in the mix and hearing masking

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