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How Do YOU Monitor A Mix?

Jim Shaw

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sarumbear

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Correction: he doesn’t mix on a car, he checks his mixes on a car. This is pretty much done by every producer.
 
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Jim Shaw

Jim Shaw

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I prefer to check mixes in the Honda Odyssey. That way the whole band can hear it.
Or perhaps a school bus for symphony orchestras? Percussion in the back, violins on the left* side, cellos and basses on the right, woodwinds back 6 rows, horns just in front of the percussion, the producer narrates on the talkback, and the conductor drives the bus?

This just leaves the harpist and the pianist in jumpseats. ;)

*Looking from the front of course.
 

fpitas

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Correction: he doesn’t mix on a car, he checks his mixes on a car. This is pretty much done by every producer.
And it reinforces what we try to tell people about the recording industry: they don't even know us audiophile sorts exist. The big market is definitely lo-fi.
 

Ricardus

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I monitor on my ribbon nearfields and check on some less expensive nearfields. I honestly don't care what it sounds like in an Escalade. There is simply no way to do a mix that is going to sound great in different cars, ear buds, headphones, and on high end systems. If you have any mixing chops at all, your mix will translate in those other environments and be "fine." But if you cater to a weird listening environment, that means you're changing what the mix will sound like on a decent system. I simply refuse to do that.

Beware of all these studio stories. Most are BS or hyperbole. They're just trying to generate likes and talk.
 

sarumbear

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And it reinforces what we try to tell people about the recording industry: they don't even know us audiophile sorts exist. The big market is definitely lo-fi.
For pop this has always been the case since the 80s when album sales started to drop. Nothing has changed, album is no longer the money earner but a merchandise. Why would the artists or the labels consider us? Audiophiles stopped buying pop after the 70s. For a long while they wouldn’t even consider pop music as worthy and listen to it, unless it is for an effect: “low registers of the female voice,” “the sub bass,” or for testing surround, Atmos or up-mixing. For jazz & classical the aim is still to produce audiophile quality albums. Tracks are long and importance paid to entire albums, which is often required for classical pieces, whereas with pop, importance is often for individual songs. Tracks on their albums are even mixed with different people at different studios.

There had been and still are pop stars who cares on sound quality. The late George Michael was one and I find Harry Styles to be another. His recordings are now reaching the quality achieved by Alan Parsons in the 70s. I hear from the grapevine is that he is an audiophile. I personally know that George definitely was.
 
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Inner Space

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... he doesn’t mix on a car, he checks his mixes on a car.
We should compile a folk history of such practices, before they cement themselves as urban myths. I remember the check-in-a-car thing as a fairly halfhearted and short-lived gimmick. Some engineers used it as PR - as if saying, hey, I care, I'm ahead of the curve, I'm adding unique value. It was mostly performative. Certainly I don't remember anyone seriously remixing or revising as a result.

I remember it starting in the early-ish 1990s. Lincoln had the first in-dash OEM CD player in 1987, as I recall. (No one had ever bothered checking via in-dash cassettes, as I recall, even though that would have been far easier - it was a new, CD-era fashion.) Players in cars got more widespread by the mid-90s. But generally they were still fairly crappy 2.0s, that didn't tell you much. Some people ran the mix via long wires to a cassette adapter, which meant you could start the engine but not drive anywhere, so you missed road noise and other factors. Others burned CDs, which was a PITA, and didn't always work well in the early days.

Overall, I remember it as a good story, rather than useful reality.
 

fpitas

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I'd think cars vary a lot. None are actually good by hi-fi standards. You might be better off just checking using crappy lo-fi speakers.
 

sarumbear

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Overall, I remember it as a good story, rather than useful reality.
The stories are not myth, they are real all right but the actions were not useful.
 
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sarumbear

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I'd think cars vary a lot. None are actually good by hi-fi standards. You might be better off just checking using crappy lo-fi speakers.
Enter Auratons…
 

fpitas

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Ifrit

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Enter Auratons…
Or NS-10s.

As far as I can recall, it was mostly the newcomers to the exciting world of home recording who wanted to check their mixes in the cars. Didn't help much to the end result.
 

Music1969

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Probably the new NS-10's / Auratones are Apple Airpods...

Essential to check mix on these given the sheer number in the wild...

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sarumbear

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Or NS-10s.
NS-10 came out for a different reason. Late '70s was a transitional time in music recording. The divide between the engineer and the artist was blurring and the possibilities for recording engineers to become more creatively involved in the process of producing a record multiplied. This is the time I left Abbey Road as I was not a musician and I realise that I do not have future in a recording studio.

Suddenly these creative recording engineers held the power and some became minor stars in their own right and started to work as freelancers. This happened initially in the US but soon the British studios followed. This new breed recording engineer/producer carried with them a few items of favourite outboard, a few microphones, and a pair of Yamaha NS10s. Yamaha soon got on board and produced a vertical orientated Studio version. It was also less bright removing the need to use a tissue paper in front of the tweeter.

The story I heard at the time is that Bob Clearmountain who was one of the first of those stars wanted a pair of monitors to carry with him so that he had a known reference. He chose NS10 as he wanted something representative of typical domestic hi-fi speakers. (However, this was refuted by engineer Nigel Jopson recently that he was the first to use NS10. Possibly both stories were true as they were apart by an ocean.)

Once Clearmountain and a few other stars began to rely on the NS10, it became a phenomenon and studios began to buy NS10s.

As far as I can recall, it was mostly the newcomers to the exciting world of home recording who wanted to check their mixes in the cars. Didn't help much to the end result.
It was widely known that many 70s mega-stars checked their final mixes on their cars. I know for a fact a few did as I was in their cars having brought the tape with me.

Note: I edited the words I used in the story above so that it doesn't use too similar phrases used in a piece published a while ago as pointed out by @restorer-john .
 
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sarumbear

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The cynic in me thinks this is a clever way to buy a fancy car and tax deduct it as a business expense
I think you have no idea how the 70s stars lived…
 
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MAB

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There had been and still are pop stars who cares on sound quality. The late George Michael was one and I find Harry Styles to be another. His recordings are now reaching the quality achieved by Alan Parsons in the 70s. I hear from the grapevine is that he is an audiophile. I personally know that George definitely was.
I guess it doesn't surprise me that George Michael cared about quality, everything he touched sounded so great. Your comment makes me happy.

I worked as a car stereo installer in the mid '80s, small town with cotton farms with an active boulevard cruise scene. Lots of Cadillacs with PA speakers where the rear seats used to be. When you finished a build and finished testing everything, you would play your favorite track to see how it sounds. Let's just say that where I worked there was a fairly narrow definition of acceptable music... I had finished putting a killer build in a '76 AMC Ambassador, and I pulled out my cassette of Make it Big and cranked Everything She Wants and brought the house down. The bass on that track is out of this world, as is everything else. Predictably, everybody gave me a hard time for playing George Michael. But the next morning the store owner grabbed my cassette and demoed the system to the customer playing Everything She Wants, it became our go-to test/demo track. That summer I would hear it pumping out all up and down the boulevards of Visalia and Tulare when we went for a cruise.
 
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