Helpful Reply[Track Completed] Mixing & Mastering with Headphones & Hi-Fi

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Alex Westner [Cakewalk]
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Re: Mixing & Mastering with Headphones & Hi-Fi 2017/05/02 14:04:12 (permalink)
Cool thread.
 
I remember when I tried to master my first CD and felt completely lost - I called up some mastering engineers for advice and they told me I'd never get my studio and monitor system to be acoustically fit on my own dime. They said I'd be much better off using a pair of nice headphones. I went with the Sennheiser HD-600's.
 
Once armed with a proper pair of headphones I knew exactly how terrible I was at mixing and mastering, and so I hired a professional...
 
Anyway, last week I had a chat with a nice guy from NextDrive, who makes a high-end USB DAC headphone amp called the Spectra:
https://www.nextdrive.io/en/product/NextDrive-Spectra
 
I'm curious what you guys make of this?

Alex Westner
VP Product Strategy & Innovation
 
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fitzj
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Re: Mixing & Mastering with Headphones & Hi-Fi 2017/05/02 20:35:21 (permalink)
SGodfrey
Guys,
I’d really appreciate some advice please.  I have a track that’s nearing completion and I’m moving on to mixing and mastering.  The problem I have is that due to living circumstances I have to use headphones 90% of the time and the rest of the time the only other option is the hi-fi in my living room.  I had thought I had a pretty good mix on my headphones but when I listened on the hi-fi it was absolutely terrible!
A word on kit – the headphones are Audio Technica M50’s, so they should be pretty good and they’re coming out of my Roland UA-25EX audio interface.  The hi-fi is very good and I always thought natural to warm sounding.  Speakers Spendor S8e floorstanders (£2k), Musical Fidelity amps (pre + monoblocks - £2K) i.e. it’s fairly high-end British stuff, not exotic.  Connected to the UA-25EX via a (not ideal!) long unshielded interconnect.  Obviously my living room is totally untreated acoustically.
The song started out on Maschine and all tracks are now imported into Sonar Plat and I have available Izotope Neutron and Ozone 7 that I just bought.
I should also say that I know that my ears are not well trained.  Sometimes when I listen to YouTube tutorials on mixing/mastering, I have difficulty hearing the difference!
Where to go from here?
  1. Should I trust the headphones or the hi-fi?
  2. I saw a tutorial on mixing with pink noise.  You solo each track in turn against a constant pink noise and reduce the volume until the track has just disappeared.  Finally turn off the pink noise and enable all tracks and the mix is virtually done.  Anyone tried this?  Also comes back to question (1) – should I try this on headphones or hi-fi?
  3. Would you put Neutron on every single track and how much should I trust the track assistant?
  4. Mastering is some way off at the moment, I’ve only used modest eq and boost11 before.  Any advice on using Ozone 7?  I do plan to export the whole mix to a simple stereo track before feeding it into Ozone, but haven’t planned any further than that.
Sorry if this is RTFM territory, I know it’s a huge subject, but the track is for a competition and I’d really like to do well!


Option 2 with Pink noise  is for Gain Staging. The idea is to get a fairly good sounding track with panning etc so you can hear all instruments in the track and well balanced before you start to add any Plugins.
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