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[Schallfeldnebel]

With confidence in your room, monitoring chain, and ears, the desire to cross-check on other systems might never completely dissapear, but is greatly reduced.

With this statement I agree, but I wrote esp. with attended sessions. You may yourself have full trust in your monitor speakers, but your client may not.

[Patrik T]

subvertbeats wrote on Wed, 16 December 2009 14:08

I disagree....whilst at first glance the logic may seem sound, the whole point of having a high resolution full range monitor system in a well known and trusted room, is to allow you to make decisions that will enable the material to sound optimal on other playback systems, despite the inherent limitations of those systems.

You can never ever tell a client that things sounded great in your room if they experience any kind of disappointment in the outside world.

I too think you should only have one monitoring system in the mastering room, naturally, but the outside world might bring back not-so happy people. As with this thread. In that case your high-res monitoring has little to zero value for them.

I encourage everyone, every time, to check things out at every playback system they have available when they get things back.


Regards
Patrik

[Tomas Danko]

Schallfeldnebel wrote on Wed, 16 December 2009 12:58

Patrik T wrote on Mon, 14 December 2009 14:00 I'd remind them to check the masters out at every available playback system outside of their studio before they decide to ditch your work. If they then experience the sensation of "wrong" everywhere, then the client is by all means right. Good point. That you should always do. Mastering studio's should not only offer monitoring with top speakers, but also offer several other monitoring possibilities, more alike what people have at home, esp. with attended sessions. In the 70s and 80s every serious engineer mixed on Auratone's, and checked up the mix on a transistor radio. Nice with all those super audiophile speaker systems, but there is something to say for working on a system much more responding to what people have at home. (BBC LS, Spendor, Harbeth, Rogers etc.)

The other day my colleagues where mixing the audio on our upcoming game Battlefield: Bad Company 2, in our large control room (5.1 system with Genelec 8050's and 2x12" sub).

In the middle of the desk, there was an old Hitachi boom box hooked up for reference.

[subvertbeats]

Schallfeldnebel wrote on Wed, 16 December 2009 13:20

With confidence in your room, monitoring chain, and ears, the desire to cross-check on other systems might never completely dissapear, but is greatly reduced. With this statement I agree, but I wrote esp. with attended sessions. You may yourself have full trust in your monitor speakers, but your client may not.

Understand and appreciate that......but to clarify, thats what you changed it to later, originally you wrote (and I originally replied to):

Quote:

Mastering studio's should not only have top speakers, but also have several sets of speakers used at people's homes, maybe even a car mock-up?

[subvertbeats]

Patrik T wrote on Wed, 16 December 2009 15:27

You can never ever tell a client that things sounded great in your room if they experience any kind of disappointment in the outside world. I too think you should only have one monitoring system in the mastering room, naturally, but the outside world might bring back not-so happy people. As with this thread. In that case your high-res monitoring has little to zero value for them. I encourage everyone, every time, to check things out at every playback system they have available when they get things back. Regards Patrik

Agreed 100% Patrik, but checking on other systems that you have at home, checking in the car etc, after receiving feedback from the client, or even before sending to the client, is very different to the suggesting of making the original mastering decisions based on aggregated listening in the mastering room across a range of installed 'typical' consumer systems.

Ben

[fuse]

subvertbeats wrote on Fri, 18 December 2009 09:34

Quote: Mastering studio's should not only have top speakers, but also have several sets of speakers used at people's homes, maybe even a car mock-up?

Iirc Bob Ohlsson posted once that this was why the NS10 came into play. I've also read about someone using a FM transmitter to listen to a track whilst driving in a car.
If it works for you why not?

[Thomas W. Bethel]

I guess I question the validity of having multiple speakers in the control room. If you are not comfortable with your main pair having a bunch of other speakers with differing frequency responses will not really tell you anything except that your mastering sounds different on many different systems. (also having lots of other speakers will affect the sound in the room from your main pair) If the client listens to the material you have mastered on a flawed system having a lot of different speaker systems in your control room is NOT going to make any difference.

For a while we had a pair of Genelec 1030s along with our Alon IVs and we would go back and forth between them with a home built switcher. The speakers were level matched so there was no difference in SPL. It was interesting to see the difference but even if the material sounded GREAT on both speakers systems it may not have sounded GREAT on the client's system.

I once had a very nice lady for a client. She was a folk singer and was a fun client to work with. The problem was that her listening system was the one in her 1990 mini station wagon. The car was old, the speakers were old and when you played back anything in the car that had any bass it rattled and buzzed especially in the 80 to 120 Hz range. Also the tweeters were long ago blown so it had very little above about 4.5 KHz. This was her "benchmark" and if it did not sound good in her car she was not happy. We did about three revision before she was happy. The material sounded good (or at least acceptable) in her car but did not sound good almost anywhere else. I know this is an extreme example but I have had clients tell me that their material did not sound good on there laptop or on their boom box or on an old pair of Koss 4A headphones that were well past their prime.

A mastering engineer can only do so much and I try and aim for the middle of the road listener experience so that no matter what the material is played on it sounds good. I assume that is what others on this board try to do.

Good topic!

[bblackwood]

fuse wrote on Fri, 18 December 2009 05:47

If it works for you why not?

Yep.

I can monologue all day long about why my method works for me and why, in theory, it's also more efficient or better than other methods, but in the end what works for you works.

There are some fundamental things I see people doing that I think hinders their ability to develop as engineers, so 'whatever works' isn't a catch-all, imo, but in a situation like this - whatever works.

I prefer one set of monitors in a good room.

[Viitalahde]

I like one set of speakers in a good room, too.

In the future, I *might* install a single speaker that takes mono signal. This would be an Avantone type of speaker, wide-range speaker driver. Nothing more.

But we'll see.

[Bob Olhsson]

Tracking, mixing and mastering each have very different monitor requirements.

Tracking monitors are for playback to the performers. They need to be full range and capable of being played just as loud as what the singers and musicians heard while they were performing. They should not be so transparent that people get lost in audio minutia instead of solving musical problems.

For mixing, I want to have BOTH full range transparent and "reference" monitors. "Reference" monitors are specifically used for sorting out balance issues between different elements that would be ambiguous using full range monitors because you can see so deeply into the mix.

I don't need "reference" monitors for mastering because there isn't a lot one can do about problems that are revealed at that stage using just eq. and dynamics. I want to hear deep so I can correct distracting colorations, noise and distortion.