Every mix I finish sounds balanced on my monitors and then in the car the bass disappears almost entirely and the cymbals are painfully bright. On phone speakers it's tolerable. I've been compensating by boosting bass and cutting highs until the car sounds right, but then the monitors sound wrong. Small room, monitors on the desk, no treatment beyond a rug. Where do I start?
Also check your mix in mono at low volume through a single small speaker. If the bass vanishes there too, you may have phase problems in the low end rather than a room problem, especially if you're layering kicks or using a stereo widener on anything below 200Hz.
Get one reference track you know extremely well, in the same genre, and A/B against it at matched loudness while you mix. It won't fix your room but it will tell you immediately that your kick is 6dB hot or your hats are miles too loud, because the reference is being coloured by the same room as your mix.
By ear is fine, just turn the reference down until it feels the same weight. Any level-matching plugin does it more precisely if you want, but the point is not being fooled by the louder one sounding better.
How do you match loudness for that comparison without overthinking it?
Cars are a terrible reference on their own, they have their own huge peaks and dips and every model is different. Use it as one of four checks, not as the truth.
Right, though a car you've listened to a thousand albums in is a useful reference precisely because you know its lies. It's the unfamiliar car that tells you nothing.
Cheap intermediate step while you sort the room: mix on decent closed headphones for the low end and check balance on monitors. Not ideal long term, but headphones don't have your room in them.
@listening_lane · 5mo ago · 3 replies
You're mixing against your room, not your monitors. In an untreated room with monitors on a desk, you almost always get a big bass buildup from the desk reflection and the wall behind, so you turn the bass down in the mix to compensate and then the car, which has none of that buildup, sounds thin. The bright cymbals are the same story in reverse. Fix the room a bit, then trust the monitors: get the tweeters at ear height, pull them 20-30cm off the wall, put something thick on the wall behind them and behind your head, and stop the desk from reflecting into your ears by tilting the monitors slightly.
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@cadence_cam · 5mo ago
Tweeters were about 15cm below ear height and the monitors were flat against the wall. Both fixed, and the low end I hear now is noticeably different.
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@milkcratepress · 5mo ago
That single change is worth more than any plugin anyone will recommend in this thread.
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