Exported audio sounds different on different speakers?

[Ron Pipes]

Okay...Okay...yeah, I know, and I get it.  All speakers sound different, and even a certain speaker of XYZ brand can sound a little different than another same model speaker from XYZ brand.  But, with that in mind, let me explain the situation a bit here and see where this goes.

I have the beginnings of a song, roughly about a minute long, and I cannot get this to sound decent through any speakers other than my monitors, a pair of M-Audio BX5's.  They're not high end monitors, but they sound decent when playing my keyboard.  I've recorded with my Korg Kronos with the audio outputs going to my little Scarlett 2I2, and the usb from there to my computer.  Simple enough operation.

I've watched numerous videos, tutorials, for mixing trying to figure this out.  So I cut this frequency here, boost it there, panning, gain staging, setup buses for tracks, for effects...I've tried it all.  And yet, when I export the audio and play it on anything else, it sounds like it's in a box....that's the only way I know to describe it.  I've tinkered with this kind of thing in the past and I've usually not had the problems I'm having now.  Each track is a single stereo track, there are no mono tracks.

So....I started to go through things track by track, re-recording with the effects on the Korg for the programs/voices, as well as just recording the dry sound and adding effects via plugins in Cakewalk.  Same problem either way.  If I record it dry, when I export the song it sounds dry and has a cheap boxy sound to it.  Record wet and the music has the effects but has that same boxy sound.  So.....I figured that I've tried EQ, tried recording dry, recording wet, went through all the gain staging, mixing, putting each instrument in its own space, etc.....what else is there?  No matter what I try it just doesn't work.  When I play back the exported audio and listen on the monitors, it sounds fabulous (to my ears).  But going through the car stereo, home stereo, bluetooth speakers, headphones, it all sounds like *****.   I'm not the only one to experience this...and it's nothing new....right?

Here's the thing though.  I took a couple of the voices and recorded just small parts in a new project, with each as a stereo track just like in the song.  Recorded both with the onboard Korg Kronos effects (Reverb, delay, whatever else comes with the sound ) and also recorded them with no effects at all.  I exported those two tracks to two different audio files.  Both play and sound great through the monitors, and both sound like ***** through anything else.  Thus, it's not a mixing issue.  Each sound by itself sounds awful through anything except the monitors.  One of the voices is a string section and what I found is that if I run the audio through a Bose stereo speaker plugged into the computers headphone jack, I'm then able to EQ the voice to sound pretty good through the speaker by cutting the heck out of the midrange and low end while boosting the upper end a bit.  So...I then took the song, EQ'd that one track with the strings in the same manner, exported the song, played it back through the speaker and, surprise....that section of the song no longer sounds like it's in a box.  I then copied the track within the project to another stereo track,  panned each stereo track differently, sent both tracks to their own bus and added a plugin to that bus to  expand the stereo image.  So, I now have two stereo tracks panned diffently, both tracks going to a bus, and have the stereo imaging plugin on the bus.  Seems a bit extreme, but it worked.  Full spacious strings sound without that boxiness.  Although I had to cut the heck out of the bass frequencies as well as the upper and lower midrange for that particular track, when played together with the Bass and drum tracks in that section of the song, it doesn't sound thin at all and the boxy sound is gone, at least in that portion of the song.

The problem here, though, is that now when I switch my audio to run back through the monitors, that section of the song still sounds good, but nowhere near as full and spacious as it did before since I cut the heck out of the lower end and the midrange.  Still sounds good, but nowhere near as full.  Unlike when playing through the regular speaker, when played through the monitors the string section now sounds a bit on the thin side.

So....I guess my question for the more experienced out there is simply this.  Is this how it's supposed to work?  Realizing that it's all subjective and that there is always going to be a compromise somewhere, is it just a matter of learning what sounds need adjusting here, and others there, in order to find that compromise?  I guess what I mean is simply that when you mix the song, is it generally the case that you may need to have the sound not quite right through your monitors in order to get it to sound good or acceptable on regular audio speakers?  This seems a bit counter intuitive to me and, although I'm sure this would come with more experience, is this how it's supposed to be?  The reason it seems counter intuitive is that it seems to me that the better the sound system, the better the song should sound, but that doesn't seem to be the case here at all.

It could also simply be the case that since it's my own creation I'm hyper critical of the sound.  Where I think it sounds thin on the monitors, someone else might think it sounds even better.

[Lord Tim]

OK, it's both simple and complicated to answer this.

I remember the first "proper" demo my band recorded back in the early 90s. Up until that point, I'd done everything myself in my own dinky home studio with whatever gear I'd accumulated, and mixed it on speakers connected to a powered PA mixer.  To me, that sounded great (narrator: it was NOT great) and really didn't translate to any other system well. We went half way across the country to do our proper demo in a real studio and I walked away from there thinking we did OK... until I played it on my gear at home. It was thin, the reverb and delay levels seemed weird, the balance of everything was out... what was going on? How does reverb level change on a bus ride home? 🤨 It was at that point I learned the difference between a treated room and an untreated room, and the difference between Yamaha NS10 speakers and my listening environment. It blew my mind!

The other wake-up call I had was when we did our first full album. Absolutely moronic mixing decisions by me aside, this was all done in a very expensive studio with a bunch of vintage gear, and then taken to one of the best mastering houses in the country. We were all fairly onboard with the overall sound of it by the time it got to mastering, but then we put on reference material as a comparison, and now that reference material sounded small and pokey. Our album was MUCH fatter sounding, MUCH more high end sizzle, the snare was MASSIVE compared to this stuff. The mastering engineer did his job based on our suggestions as for what kind of sound we wanted to go for, and we all went home and got on with our lives, not really obsessing about the album much for a while, being happy to listen to something else for a change. By the time we came back around to listening to our album, it sounded like a dumpster fire. Why was the low end so muddy? What was all that fizzy high end? Dear god, why is the snare so fat?  Mind blown again!

The lessons from this were perspective and environment, and ultimately experience.

The first thing is environment:

If your room isn't treated well, or your speakers aren't accurate, you have NO IDEA what you're listening to. And even if your room IS treated well, different speakers bring out certain elements more than others. For example, I absolutely HATE NS10s because the upper mid bump they have makes my ears tired in no time at all, but other people swear by them because they're so unforgiving. So you need to be familiar with your speakers and listen to a bunch of reference material on them to understand how they're going to react to "properly done" pro mixes, so you can be objective about it all. And if you find that when you sit in your mixing position all of the bass goes away or you're not getting a lot of positional clarity for certain instruments, it really means you need to look at your room acoustics.

Perspective:

Our brains lie. That fizzy guitar sound? Listen to that for 8 hours straight and I bet when you listen to a good guitar tone it sounds flat and boring. That huge low end you have in your mix sounds absolutely fine if you've listened to it all week and it makes commercial releases sound thin. But I also bet that if you took a break from those things and came back to them later, it'd sound like garbage. Unless you're stopping for sanity breaks, which means time away from a mix, and regularly listening to well-mixed reference material to reset your ears, your brain will slowly get more and more skewed with that you think is good. This also plays into the environment thing too: Even if you're having sanity breaks and doing everything you can for a good mix, this environment can also trick your ears into thinking it sounds good when some room modes are comb-filtering out really important information that you're trying to compensate for. You need to know your room, and understand the limitations of it so you can trust that the reference mixes you're going back to for sanity checks work. Your room doesn't have to be perfect (few are) but you need to at least know what's going on in it so you can make a proper decision.

And that leads me to experience:

How do you know how your speakers sound compared to others? Listen to great mixes on each of then. How do you know if there's any holes in your frequency spectrum in your room? Listen to great mixes in there and compare that experience to other places that sound good. Maybe even get hold of some acoustic measurement software and go through and properly treat your room if it's definitely not working well. The more variables you can take out of this, the better. How does a good mix sound on your studio monitors? How does it sound on your little boom box speakers? In your car? On your laptop speakers? On your phone speaker? They all sound VERY different, I bet. But the trick is to understand that if a pro mix that you think sounds world class sounds that way on all of those speakers, so will yours. There's really no one-size-fits-all mix, only your ideal listening environment, and experience telling you what you need to do to compromise to have it work on the other places.

So my advice:

Listen, listen, listen. Get something you know sounds fantastic that was commercially released that you love the sound of. Play it EVERYWHERE and really pay attention to how it sounds on each system. You'll find it will probably sound radically different. And then take it back to your studio monitors and get used to how it feels in your room. REALLY listen to it. Take some notes as to how you think it differed on each system - was the snare too poky and loud on your laptop speakers? Did the vocals get a little lost when you listened in your car? This happens, and you can't really do anything about each listening environment, other than understanding how it changes. If this is a commercially released pro mix and it's doing this, you can feel fairly safe that it's going to be comparable to other commercially released pro mixes, so if you're aiming to get yours to compromise in the same way across each system, then you know you're on the right track.

Don't obsess over the minutiae - if you're worried about your reverb sounding quieter or your kicks not being as deep on some systems, and it's doing more or less the same thing as a pro mix is doing, it means your brain is starting to lie to you. Refer back to the pro mix for a sanity check.

Get as familiar with your room and speakers as possible with pro mixes and then use your judgement of how your mix sounds in comparison to theirs in that environment. If you can get it in the same ballpark, then take it to a proper mastering engineer for the final touches. You're already 80% there at this point, but the final EQ and compression that an experienced mastering engineer can give it will help it translate even better across systems. It will NEVER be perfect, and it isn't for ANY mix, but this can at least ensure you're actually comparing apples to apples with everything else when they're played back on different systems.

So yeah, that's a lot of words to say that "yes, it's supposed to sound different, and get some experience" but it honestly takes years for the lightbulb to truly switch on. Be methodical but also give yourself a break too - you need to train yourself to understand when your brain is just being a jerk to you. We've all been there! (Some days, I still am 🙄). Good luck!

Edited May 9, 2022 by Lord Tim

[Glenn Stanton]

one more thing to add: ask someone you can count on for objective listening to give a listen when you think you've made progress as sometimes the things you thought should be at one level or another, when someone else is listening, they may have a different opinion on that... a second set of ears can really help to focus and get your mixes to improve.

[bats brew]

ah, the argument for more expensive monitors, and some room treatment, are inside this post.

[Lord Tim]

I don't necessarily think *more expensive* monitors are the answer, but ones that are not hyped like home stereo ones are so it's not prettying up the sound too much. On the other hand, there's never a downside to room treatment. If your room is working against you, you could have the best monitors in the world and you still won't be able to make the correct mixing choices because you'll never know if it's real or not. I'll go so far as saying that THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in your mixing chain isn't your DAW or your speakers or your outboard gear, it's your room. And then I'd look at the speakers after that if you're finding them lacking.

[Byron Dickens]

https://ledgernote.com/columns/studio-recording/bass-traps/

[Lord Tim]

This place is also a fantastic resource for learning about room acoustics: 

https://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=3

I can say without question that the reason my studio sounds so good (and therefore my mixes translate well) is because of that forum.

[Glenn Stanton]

23 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

This place is also a fantastic resource for learning about room acoustics:  https://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=3

I can say without question that the reason my studio sounds so good (and therefore my mixes translate well) is because of that forum.

not to mention the awesome designer 🙂 lol

i have to say, my Bose 901 are brutal to bad mixes. a good mix sounds great, a great mix - it's the reason people bought them in the first place. you cannot mix on them though, only listen. but if your mix passes the 901 test for goodness, it tends to translate really well. an older pair can be bought cheaply. 

otherwise, as Tim noted - mix on the best pair of monitors you can afford, and then listen on a bunch of other systems - headphones, mono speaker, phone, PC, car, TV, TV surround, etc and after a while you'll begin to know what you need to hear from your monitoring and room in order to get the translations.

[Lord Tim]

22 minutes ago, Glenn Stanton said:

not to mention the awesome designer 🙂 lol

Yeah, that guy goes alright! HAHA! 

[Tim Smith]

Setting up a room for mixing and calibrating the monitors can seen like a daunting thing to a home studio guy. It really isn't a difficult thing to correct.

While what happens when we DON'T have anything calibrated has already been explained, I will try to explain the same thing condensed in another way, just in case you might not be getting what's going on. 

Here is a a very real scenario in many home studios- 

The mids and bass have a longer wave than higher notes. Why is this important in most rooms with no sound treatment? If you could see an audio wave, you would be able to tell the size of the wave itself closely matches the room dimensions of the walls and ceiling. The invisible sound wave matches the  visible dimensions of the room. One you can see, the other you can't but we KNOW these invisible waves are close because we know how long a given wave is for that frequency.

Why is it important to know this? Because the result is what are called 'standing waves' . These waves will have a tendency to not only color or make muddy lows and mids, it also has the effect of amplifying these same frequencies. If you use a set of monitors that already has  some mud, the room will only make it worse.

When you hear this in an untreated room the first thing that will fool you is you will think there is too much bass or low mids. What you didn't know is  the room only made it seem there was too much bass. As a result you will reduce those frequencies or knock down the bass in EQ. When you play the track back on a more balanced system guess what? It will have all or much of the bass taken out of it. This is because you heard the ROOM and not the real mix. Similar issues can occur if recording something like an acoustic guitar in a similar room. The recording picked up way too much low end woof in that room. SDC mics help in that as well, instead of LDC mics since they minimize the low end.

Different rooms can have different hype at different frequencies, but GENERALLY most rooms are picking up and reflecting more bass and mid than high end.

How do you solve this? Bass traps can help as can some sound absorption panels here and there. You don't want an acoustically dead room either, you just need to knock the resonances out. Believe it or not normal everyday towels stacked tow or three high and put into some kind of a pretty frame to hang on the wall are more effective than acoustic foam. There is a science to the way this is done. Ceilings and floors are just as important. A carpeted floor or large rug saves you some trouble there. Panels are often hung from ceilings.

I've  successfuly used electronic correction options with pretty good results. This can save so much work in room treatments. If you can use both it's even better.

What I use-

IK Multimedia's ARC 3 for my room monitors

Sonarworks headphone correction to correct imbalance in my mixing headphones

Louder volume works against you while mixing. It is best to mix at lower volumes. Long mixes can cause ear fatigue and you then get the Fletcher Munson effect. This is your tired ears fooling you. This is why a mix always sounds worse the next day because your ears are rested.

Edited May 12, 2022 by Tim Smith

[Tim Smith]

Another very important thing is monitor height and position to your ears. A triangle configuration is generally recommended, but often HEIGHT is not mentioned. You will want the monitors at ear height, not below your ears and about 3ft away minimum. You need to be able to pick up the detail coming from the tweeters as well as bass detail.

[Quick Math]

I used to use the same monitor. The frequency response of the monitor isn't that flat. And without a subwoofer nor headphones, you can't hear extremely low frequencies from the monitors.

I really don't know what's the cause of that but maybe you could let others listen to the mix so that one can identify the problems of your mix?

And having a reference tracks when mixing would be helpful.

Headphones with some frequency adjustments (like what Sonarworks plugin does) can be more reliable than monitors in untreated room.

And mid range is the more important than high frequencies simply because other speakers are usually not as good as your monitor speakers, so high and low can be compromised and what you hear is basically mid range frequencies. I don't mean you should simply boost mid range with EQ but mid range needs to be clear and powerful, or "standout". And this kind of thing is from mastering perspective and not necessarily about mixing so perhaps you might have missed that?

Mastering is like to make your mix sounds great for any speakers and headphones.

[Starship Krupa]

On 5/9/2022 at 12:12 AM, Ron Pipes said:

I had to cut the heck out of the bass frequencies as well as the upper and lower midrange for that particular track, when played together with the Bass and drum tracks in that section of the song, it doesn't sound thin at all and the boxy sound is gone, at least in that portion of the song.

So you cut the bass and midrange and it no longer sounded boxy. This is not surprising.

What may we glean from this? In general, if you find that things have too much midrange and/or bass when you reference them on other systems....that suggests that your monitoring setup is somehow deficient in those areas. Simple as that. You're cranking those freqs to compensate for it.

Good on ya for chasing down the issue. No longer a mystery, now you know what's wrong, you just need to figure out how to correct it. Mixes not "translating" is an old old problem for which there are well-established solutions.

On 5/9/2022 at 3:50 AM, Lord Tim said:

How do you know how your speakers sound compared to others? Listen to great mixes on each of them. How do you know if there's any holes in your frequency spectrum in your room? Listen to great mixes in there and compare that experience to other places that sound good.

This is the most golden of advice. One of the first tricks I figured out all by myself back in the days of cassette 4-tracks. Like how Bauhaus sounds? Play some Bauhaus on your mixing system every once in a while to "remind" yourself what a well mixed and mastered track sounds like. Yes, I was into Bauhaus back in the day.

So, now we've established that at least compared to your other listening environments, your BX-5's, sitting where they are, have some frequency dips at your listening position. What can we do to help the situation?

Take a look at how you're positioning the monitors in relation to your head and how you're mounting them. Those things look to be back-ported, so make sure you don't have the backs jammed up against the wall. As much as you're able, try moving your workstation to a different place in the room. Ideally, as most know, your speakers should be placed to form an equilateral triangle with your head. Try to achieve that as much as possible. If they're sitting on a desk, raise them up. If you turn your head to look at a monitor, you should be staring straight into its tweeter.

Do they have frequency balance adjustment controls on the back? If so, experiment with them. If they don't, you could possibly put an EQ on an output bus, after the bus you export your mixes from.

You can get a reference measuring mic for around $50 new. That will allow you to take accurate measurements of frequency response at your listening position. I did this, but just grabbed the most accurate LDC mic in my locker ("a half-***** job is better than none!"). Put it on a stand where my head usually is and swept tones and white noise through my speakers while watching on an analyzer plug-in. The Meldaproduction FreeFX Bundle comes with all of the software tools you need to do this.

Doing this satisfied me that there wasn't anything TOO weird going on with my setup. I don't have bass traps as such, but I also don't have 4 parallel walls and I do have multiple bookcases in the room, which actually serve as pretty good bass traps in practice. 10' ceiling with coffer beams also helps. Worst is a room with nothing on the walls, uncarpeted, parallel walls, 8' ceiling. But some people have that because that's what they have.

I won't say unequivocally "you need to treat your room in XX way" because we don't know exactly what freqs your room is emphasizing (although upper mids and highs sounds likely, so you could try hanging a blanket on the wall behind you and see what happens).

Can you afford to consider different monitors? Maybe now that your ears know better, it's time to go audition some and take it to the next level. Maybe not. None of my monitors is likely to show up on anyone's wish list (more likely they'll say they had a set of them back in 1997 and outgrew them) but I know their sound and how it compares with other setups. My Events are, as they say, "revealing," which works for me.

[John Vere]

I bought my NSM 10’s in the mid 90’s when I had a real studio and music store. So my relationship goes way back. I’ve had those in both properly treated spaces and in my spare bedroom drywall box. Guess what those mixes came out like?  I’ve been in less that perfect spaces since I sold the studio 15 years ago and all I can say is it’s extra work to mix in a crappy room.

You can do it, but in the old days I would nail  a mix first time round. I’m still always very close but I look forward to finishing my new space.

The wife sort of wanted a new kitchen, bathroom etc first. But after 2 year those projects are almost done. Just yesterday I was stuffing Roxul insulation in the ceiling joists. It’s in a half finished basement space. I’m going for dead but with lots of soft wooden slats and shapes. 
Anyhow. My answer to the op is like the others. The right monitors in the right room. Or. Spend a million hours re mixing. Or get lucky 🍀 

[Tim Smith]

On 5/23/2022 at 12:47 AM, John Vere said:

I bought my NSM 10’s in the mid 90’s when I had a real studio and music store. So my relationship goes way back. I’ve had those in both properly treated spaces and in my spare bedroom drywall box. Guess what those mixes came out like?  I’ve been in less that perfect spaces since I sold the studio 15 years ago and all I can say is it’s extra work to mix in a crappy room.

You can do it, but in the old days I would nail  a mix first time round. I’m still always very close but I look forward to finishing my new space.

The wife sort of wanted a new kitchen, bathroom etc first. But after 2 year those projects are almost done. Just yesterday I was stuffing Roxul insulation in the ceiling joists. It’s in a half finished basement space. I’m going for dead but with lots of soft wooden slats and shapes. 
Anyhow. My answer to the op is like the others. The right monitors in the right room. Or. Spend a million hours re mixing. Or get lucky 🍀 

You are much further along than I am. I still have several projects in front of my dream mixing room. At the rate I'm going I might not be able to use by the time I get to it.