The Reason Why Your Mix Fails on Other Speakers

So you go through all that hard work, get a track sounding lush on your headphones, pop it in the car and it sounds weak. Or play it on some laptop speakers and it sounds muddy. It feels like the mix has betrayed you, especially after you’ve spent so much time on it. This is probably because you’ve been mixing with the goal of sounding good in a single environment, instead of mixing with the goal of having it translate. The fact is, every playback system will exaggerate some frequencies and mask others. Headphones will make your stereo image sound wider than it is, where a laptop will remove the bass. It’s better to get good at predicting how it will sound elsewhere rather than getting it sounding perfect on your speakers.

A common error is to create a balance that seems to have plenty of bottom end in your room, but which will translate as all midrange outside. Your monitors can produce sub-bass, but when you take the mix elsewhere its bottom seems to disappear. Rather than turning the bass up, try to get the midrange of the bass part to cut through. Use a touch of warmth or judicious EQ to keep the bass line sounding solid even when its sub-bass is inaudible. This tricks the ear into hearing the part as full even on playback systems that can’t produce the bottom.

Getting into the habit of doing this for just 15 minutes at the end of each mix session can make a massive difference to the translation of your mixes. I use my phone speaker for this purpose. I don’t make loads of changes — I just want to hear what’s gone, what’s come to the front and what’s fatiguing. I make a few tweaks and then go back to my main speakers to see if the balance still translates. Over time this process teaches your ears to anticipate how your choices will translate outside the room you’re in.

Harshness is also masked when you sit for a while. As you listen longer your ears will get more fatigued and you’ll turn up the highs, and it will sound overly sharp on other players. When the cymbals or voices sound a bit too sharp in other players, just bring down the highs a notch or two instead of muting a whole track. That way, you can still hear everything just fine and save your listener’s ear. You don’t want it to sound muffled or dull, but bright and sharp without being painful at a wide range of volumes.

Accurate translation is also a matter of building an internalized notion of what balanced music sounds like on any system. Hearing commercial releases on the same systems that you monitor with aids in this process. It makes it easier to tell when a mix has too much bass, a recessed midrange, or too much stereo image when it’s folded into a mono signal. A translationally accurate mix may not sound great on any one system, but it will sound plausible on all of them. That is the true test of control.