From above:

2) I use a KRK 10" sub, and a pair of behringer truth monitors.  I originally purchased the behringers a few years ago because I didn't know the difference and they were cheap. However they do sound decent. I am saving for new KRK monitors as we speak. However since the room has been treated, my mixes pretty decent.  I am able to A/B the subwoofer. I can bypass the sub and just hear the monitors alone or hear the monitors with the sub together. I origianlly had issues with the amount of bass in the mix. It was always way to much or way too little before I got the sub.  I loaded a few commercially recorded songs similar to the style of music that I record and adjusted the sub volume to be appropriate for the room (post foam treatment). I saw an immediate improvment and now the amount of bass in my mixes is appropriate.  I have heard many times that using a sub is bad, but it seems to work for me.

Hi John
 
You know your in a pretty good situation having your own room to do what you can.  The only trouble may be that it's small.
 
I want to just second what the others have mentioned about further reading so that you understand just what your getting yourself into.  Some people even spend the money to hire a pro to set up the room.
 
You can poor a lot of money into foam only to find out that maybe all you needed was better placement for your desk and chair etc. (it really can make an impact).
 
The structure (ceiling and corners make a big impact).  But there may be a quick fix that doesn't cost  more than some sheets of foam or wood.   I'm just suggesting on spending  little money on a book first and then take it from there.
 
 
 

some people say you should spend half your studio budget on your monitors.  It's that important.  I ignored this advice for a long time, mixing on all kinds of speakers as well as phones.

While I didn't spend as much on monitors as all the rest of my stuff combined, I did drop over $1K on them, and knew immediately once I started working with them why people would say such a thing. 

What good speakers did for me was to open up the sound field as a 3-D image where I could hear the various parts in their respective places. Until you hear that, you can;t really move things around and place them in said sound field, which to me is the goal of mixing.  JMO.

My own advice is somewhat along the line of let the room soak into you...

Play things in it with your speakers you do have.

Listen to how the sound moves through the room.

These things do take time..and that, I think, is the most important part.

i just don't buy it..good talent, good ears, and good gear..can get cancelled out by the room???.. stone bullsh*t. i have tons of records that were recorded, in inferior enviroments, that i still listen too and enjoy..who has the money and time to pscho-analyze the enviroment when something needs to be layed down. and explain to me how so many people sound bad in great rooms... folks were getting phenominal sound years before the acoustic treatment market.  i truly wish the psuedo intetnet engineer would stop!!! ..and go away. and i mean that sh*t from the bottom of my heart.

Hey folks, I have a friend of a friend who owns a studio where a few well known artists have recorded and they do tv commercials, voice overs etc.  I asked him for advise on mixing and mix environment one time and he basically said this:  He suggested I treat the room, not specifically for flat response, but to stop all of the sound from bouncing around in the room. Pick a few cds and listen to them on my monitors, add a couple of bass traps if the room is too boomy.  Continue to use the cds as a reference as I mix. He felt that I would learn, aclimate and adjust to my environment.  He suggested to get a decent pair of monitors, to not spend a ton of money on them because I probly wouldn't hear the difference in my home studio. The other thing that he said a few times, was to learn as much as I could about eqing and understanding which instrument use which freqs. He didn't like the idea of a subwoofer either but I already had it. 

So my advise is this: Sounds like you want new monitors and you can afford them, get them!  Do some basic room treatment. Start with the $99 room kit or similar. Some of the arguments in this thread discuss the accuracy and necessity of treatment, blah, blah, blah.  An untreated room is also not an accurate environment (especially if it is just a spare room in your house). Do you think think treating it will make it worse? If you find you need more treatment, then do more. If it made it worse, package it up and send it back for a refund (tack it up before gluing it). I think you will notice an immediate difference with new monitors and  basic room treatment. Will it be the most perfect engineered solution?  No, but it should be a noticable improvement.  
 
I find my studio is similar to the songs I record. At some point I have to just decide that I am done.  I could continue to tinker and tweek forever because there is always something I think should or could be better. Its a sickness!!!!!

:)

Mixes sound the same to me through my KRK Rokit 6s (powered, fairly new), Alesis Monitor One MK2s (passive, pretty old), and two sets of Bose headsets (one new and one old, slightly different models). To me this means either that they are all accurate, or it is a fantastic coincidence that they sound the same.

John T


I really dislike advice like that. "Spend half your studio budget on your monitors". What does that even mean? How can you even *have* a studio budget until you've started working out some of the details of the problem? That would amount to thinking "I don't really understand this problem, but I'm going to spend exactly X on it, feels like an amount that would work". What?

now, john, if you'd grokked the message in toto rather than pick sound bites out of it, you'd see that it said "monitors that allow you to hear the soundfield accurately are important",  and didn't make any recommendations at all about money or budgets or solving any particular problem.  Might help you prevent a few, though. 

You can overcome a lot of stuff by just having a feel for your environment, like a lot of people have said. But you can't really work around not being able to hear the effects of what you do with your gear.  JMO...

Cactus Music


With out a sub you will miss low  frequency content like rumble  and Popped P's.

This is not necessarily true, it depends on what the main monitors are like. And indeed, if you've got main monitors that don't reproduce popped P's, you shouldn't even be thinking about adding a sub. You need to unplug your main monitors, put them in your car, drive out to a landfill site, throw them in, and go and get some monitors with a half-way decent frequency range. I'm not even joking about that. And I'm not talking about spending a fortune on a really high end set of monitors here. Monitors on which you can't hear human voice plosives are junk, and if you're using something like that, but doing all kinds of fancy room treatment voodoo, then you're wasting time and money.
 
I guess this is an example of what troubles me about this thread. There's a lot of bold (but rather vague) directives to just throw money at the problem, by buying ever more bits of gear, but not a lot of analysis of what the problem actually is. Which is, I think, a bit irresponsible of us collectively. If advising someone down a route that involves spending a lot of money, it's probably best to make sure you're right.

This stuff isn't rocket science, though. The barriers to good monitoring are 1/ the frequency range of your monitors 2/ the overall quality and accuracy of your monitors 3/ the cancellation effects of your room. That's really it. Note I say "cancellation". There are a load of other factors to the way a room sounds, but they are far less significant, and they are a long way down the list of priorities.

1 and 2 can both be solved to a good enough standard relatively cheaply these days. There are a ton of good mid-priced monitors out there.
 
3 is subject to nearly as much loony internet forum voodoo as threads about guitar wood types or audiophile speaker cable, but it's really not that complex. Cancellation problems are caused by reflections in the room. The greatest preponderance of these, doubly so in small rooms, are at the bass end, meaning you've got more problematic cancellation in the bass end. Meaning that you are almost certainly mixing too bassy, and you're not even accurately hearing the bass in your over bassy mix. So you've got a messy low end and your mixes aren't translating. 
 
You solve this with broadband absorption that soaks up *all* frequencies, which is exactly what a good "bass trap" will do. Don't worry about "tuning" it. We're just hoovering stuff up here. You don't tune your hoover, you just get all the crap off the floor. That's it, more or less. You're just absorbing whatever you can so that the sound is dominated by direct sound from the speakers, and not reflected sound from the walls, or the cancellation effects that reflected sound creates.
 
Also: There is almost certainly no point attempting to "tune" a domestic room. And in any case, in the rare circumstances where it's both worthwhile and achievable, it's a long way down the list of priorities after sorting out your general bass cancellation problem. Probably after buying a kettle even. Again, I'm not kidding.
 
This can all be done for not that much money, if you work out the details and think it through properly. It's very easy though, to fling money at the wrong problems and get nowhere.

 I am certainly not a pro at recording, and I don't have the techinical or engineering knoweldge a pro would have. I apologize if I gave bad advise somewhere in this thread.  Not sure how many pro studio guys are on the thread and how many are serious hobbyists as myself.   I do not have a pro budget so I have always taken the approach to spend a reasonable amount money on the right things to get some improvement and so far it has worked. I saw someone posted something similar to "before taking someone's advise about mixing, listen to the music they have mixed".  I would be interested in hearing mix coming from a completely treated environment (home studio) and a mix coming from the typical (if there is one) home studio.  I am here to learn and have fun with recording. I have lerned a lot form the forums, and I have also learned there are many opionions out there.  Questions get asked and we all are trying to help each other. What works for one person may not work for everyone. Some solutions may not be ideal, but still practical of come with some amount of value.

Occams Razor:  select among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect.

Thanks all!!

To add to the earlier point about cancellation, it's very easy for a sub to create more problems than it solves, in a small untreated room. Which is another example of why I think unqualified "go and get this piece of gear" advice is bad advice. 

You can get pretty bassy plosives, no argument with that. Indeed, by their very nature, plosives unavoidably have a proximity effect, which will almost always mean more pronounced bottom end  But the idea that they're inaudible outside the sub bass range is probably only true if you've got elephant vocalists.