Lane

Mostly it's your ears, and specifically it's loudness plus fatigue. Two hours into a session your hearing has adapted, harshness stops registering, and you also tend to creep the volume up, which makes everything sound fuller because of how our hearing weights bass and treble at higher levels. The next morning you hear the actual balance. The practical fixes are boring and they work: mix at a fixed moderate level, take a real break every 45 minutes, and make your final balance decisions quietly and early rather than loudly and late.

Set the monitor level where a conversation across the room is comfortable without raising your voice, put tape on the knob, and stop moving it. That's close enough to be useful.

Also possible you're being a bit hard on softer German steel. A 56-58 HRC blade at 15 degrees per side is a thin edge for that hardness, and it will roll. Try 17-18 per side and see whether it holds four dinners instead of two. Less impressive on paper, better on Tuesday.

Now try moving the whole rig off the centre of the room and away from the corner. Standing waves in a 3x4 room put a big lump right in that range.

Fixable at the source, and the fix is mostly about what's behind the singer rather than behind the mic. That boxiness is early reflection off the wall the singer is facing coming back into the mic a few milliseconds after the direct sound. Turn the whole setup so the singer faces into the room's longest dimension with the mic pointing at the most absorptive thing you own, put the two foam panels behind the singer instead, and hang a duvet on a stand about a metre in front of them. Foam behind the mic does very little for 300-500Hz anyway, it's too thin.

Slightly against the grain: on a knife I use daily I'd just round the stub into a functional low tip and carry on, then fix it properly the next time it needs a full session. A shortened tip on a gyuto is cosmetic for most home cooking.

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.

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.

One more thing to rule out: on a lot of santoku the heel has a slight ricasso or an unsharpened choil area. If that's the case you may be trying to sharpen a section that was never meant to have an edge.

Worth adding that you can test the theory for free: plug in any other mic with higher output, or a line source, and see whether the hiss follows the gain knob. If it does, it's the preamp.

Exactly, the gap is where the low frequency work happens. A 10cm panel with 10cm of air behind it behaves far more like a 20cm panel than like a 10cm one.

Corners first, and it does matter, though not for the reason people usually give. In a room that size your worst problems are low frequency modes that make the bass wildly uneven from seat to seat, and thin panels on the front wall do nothing about those while making the room sound deader in a way that fools you into thinking it's fixed. With 200 I'd build four 10-15cm thick mineral wool panels and straddle them across the two front corners floor to ceiling, then use anything left for first reflection points at the sides. Thickness beats coverage every time.

Didn't realise splash-and-go was a category rather than a technique. That solves my actual problem.

This cost me about three months of thinking I had a wrist problem.