Monitoring

Monitors are for accuracy, not excitement#

A lot of hi-fi gear is voiced to sound exciting, warm, detailed or expensive. Makers are free to do that and you're free to enjoy it. But we're supposed to be audio engineers. That's why they're called monitors. Accuracy is what lets your decisions translate to other systems.

Speakers, headphones and microphones are very good nowadays, but unlike DACs and cables they aren't entirely solved problems, and neither is acoustic treatment. Transducers are the most important thing in your setup. They make all the difference, and sometimes you have to pay for nice stuff.

If your mix sounds bad, it's the monitoring or the skill#

At the end of the day, if your mix sounds bad, it's probably either because your monitoring sucks or because it's a skill issue. It's not because you're missing an old metal box. The differences between a mix with analogue-modelling plugins and one without are subtle and in my blind test people actually couldn't tell between stock plugins and modelling plugins. What makes or breaks a mix is skill.

Room quality decides what you monitor on, not room size#

"Small room, small speakers; big room, big speakers" is wrong. It's sometimes right by accident, because small rooms are usually bad rooms. A better rule: bad-sounding room, small sealed speakers close to you or headphones; good-sounding room, big full-range speakers with a low resonant frequency.

In a bad room, small full-range ported monitors can stack their own errors on top of the room's, and mixes often don't translate well. In a bad-sounding room I'd much rather have a 400-euro pair of Auratones with no bass than a 10,000-euro pair of full-range monitors. A professional sorts out the space first, rents a unit on an industrial estate if need be, and treats it. An amateur puts the speakers he likes on a desk against the bedroom wall and hopes for the best.

Closer is better, and headphones are the logical extreme#

If you bring speakers closer, you hear more direct sound relative to the room's reverberant sound. That's the whole rationale for nearfield monitoring. If you put the speakers on your ears, you hear 100% direct signal and no room at all. Those are headphones.

Unless you have a world-class room, meaning something like 100 grand of room-within-a-room construction, your speakers can deviate plus or minus 10 or even 20 dB. How do you do any sensible mastering with that? In a genuinely world-class room speakers are better: less fatiguing, more comfortable. Maybe less than 0.1% of people actually have access to this though. It's like taking the best watchmaker in Geneva, putting him in the back of a car at night and asking him to assemble a watch.

The secret is in the midrange#

If you want a mix that translates, you must nail the mids. Sub-bass and top-end fairy dust matter relatively little for the mix, and a mastering engineer can sort them out quickly. That's why many pro mixers are happy on mid-focused speakers like NS10s.

Mixing low end on inaccurate full-range speakers in a bad room can be counterproductive. You lean on sub frequencies that other systems don't reproduce, or you EQ bass notes to cancel the room's peaks and nulls, and the mix can fall apart everywhere else.

You can mix and master on headphones#

"Never mix on headphones"... Not long ago it was almost a scandal when a top mixer admitted to working on headphones in a hotel room. Now people have got used to it. The claim that you can't judge reverb and space on headphones is overstated, because a bad room is the bigger problem. You can master on headphones too, but only if you know them extremely well. That's a big if, and it takes a lot of ear training. See headphones.

Stock Sennheiser HD600-family headphones, plugged into the headphone jack of a Mac at a sensible level, are likely a better monitoring situation than 90% of people in the audio industry have access to. Insisting on expensive rooms and speakers is gatekeeping, and it sends people down a very expensive rabbit hole.