I have some good studio monitors (Tannoy dual concentric 10" with sub woofer).

I also have some small Fostex speakers for checking the mix on small speakers.

My trouble is it seems like everyone wants to have a mix optimized for car stereo, or at least to sound good in a car stereo. So I always make a cd and drive around with it in order to deal with this. It would be nice to have the sound of a car stereo on tap in the studio.

My impression is that stock car stereos generally have a boost in the high bass in order to compensate for not having low bass.

Does anyone have a monitor that mimics a car stereo?

Does anyone have a monitor that mimics a car stereo?

Yeah, but it's in a Jeep, so it's not much easier than putting a car in your control room.

I think the thing with car stereo mixes is more about the listening environment as it is about the speakers, although I could be wrong. Good car stereo, bad car stereo, pioneer speakers, bose speakers, factory GM system, windows up, windows down, subwoofer, no sub- they all still sound and feel like listening in a car. And for a lot of people, that's main place where they actually listen to music, as opposed to just having it on in the background, which is why they want it to sound good there.

If you really think it's about the speakers, then you could always head down to autozone or lappen's and pick up some cheap "full-range" car stereo speakers. But I think your existing "burn it to CD and take it for a drive" approach is the one that most people use.

Cheers.

The reason people like listening in their car is more to do with the environmental acoustics of the car itself. It's pretty much perfect with an even modal response due to the curvature of the 'walls' and virtually no reverberant field to muddy things up. Carpet and foam everywhere to do lots of absorbing. The perfect listening environment. It's always cool to listen to a mix in your car if you have one, just for that reason. Car speakers all differ in their characteristics.

Regards,

Neil.

I smell an opportunity... the car-seat mixdown booth!

It will come in two models: a control surface that you add to your dashboard, or a car seat (with carpet & upholstery, and optional steering wheel) that you install at your studio's control desk.

No? OK, maybe somebody can just write a car-interior modeling DXi. Choose your make, model, interior, stereo/speaker system, power supply, engine displacement, and air/tilt/cruise.

ORIGINAL: pharohoknaughty

I have some good studio monitors (Tannoy dual concentric 10" with sub woofer).

I also have some small Fostex speakers for checking the mix on small speakers.

My trouble is it seems like everyone wants to have a mix optimized for car stereo, or at least to sound good in a car stereo. So I always make a cd and drive around with it in order to deal with this. It would be nice to have the sound of a car stereo on tap in the studio.

My impression is that stock car stereos generally have a boost in the high bass in order to compensate for not having low bass.

Does anyone have a monitor that mimics a car stereo?

A good car sound system has six speakers... two in the corners of the front side windows or top of the dash, two in the doors or under the dash, and two on the back window shelf. Then there are those with sub-woofers in the trunk!

But you would need more than just the speakers to get the same effect in your studio. It's the shape of the car interior and the speakers tuned for that enclosure that make it sound the way it does. Leather or cloth covered seats, rug on the floor, padded ceiling, reflective glass around your head with the diffusion of the dash and back window shelf. It's a great place to listen to music.

Music sounds better in my studio than it does in my car... but I still check mixes in the car because it's one more place where I know what to expect. I know what it should sound like there. When I get it to sound great in the studio, on the boom box, in the living room, and in the car... it's in the can.

ORIGINAL: losguy

I smell an opportunity... the car-seat mixdown booth!

It will come in two models: a control surface that you add to your dashboard, or a car seat (with carpet & upholstery, and optional steering wheel) that you install at your studio's control desk.

No? OK, maybe somebody can just write a car-interior modeling DXi. Choose your make, model, interior, stereo/speaker system, power supply, engine displacement, and air/tilt/cruise.

So I always make a cd and drive around with it in order to deal with this.

lol,,,the things we do to achieve a good mix,,,,, and thats just it,, try everything ,,develop an ear for the sound ya looking for ,, An older method of mastering and (I'm sure some of the 'best" will deny) is to use an in-expensive stereo system,,just an amp and a pair of speakers or even try your computer speakers, I've produced some good mixes using a pair of 10$ altec lansings,listening at a "low level"..... one day! it will, just happen for ya,,,

Also,, A major consideration is who is the final mix for ,,you or a client ?
You will have to adjust your mixes accordingly for each client ,, thats alot of fun

Personally, I am a fan of having one very trustworthy monitoring chain and listening environment. You'll go crazy trying to adjust a mix to sound great on everything (I used to do that all the time until I fixed up my monitoring). I think on a bad stereo, a good mix will only sound as good as what the stereo is capable of reproducing. That's why excellent monitoring is useful. Good monitoring, that you are well aquainted with, will reveal problems to you before you head out to the car.

-Erik

ORIGINAL: soundfreely

Good monitoring, that you are well aquainted with, will reveal problems to you before you head out to the car.

No argument there... but if you call it done before you check it in the car, there's a good chance you'll never hear it on the radio.

ORIGINAL: jardim do mar
... I've produced some good mixes using a pair of 10$ altec lansings,listening at a "low level"..... one day! it will, just happen for ya,,,

FWIW, Yamaha NS-10s, which are almost certainly the most widely-used nearfield monitors in professional mixing environments, are also pretty much the world's most perfectly constructed crappy speaker. Slightly brittle, thoroughly mediocre low-end, they pretty much simulate a department-store stereo with slightly more even response. And this is no secret, either. Mixing engineers like them because "NS-10" mixes tend to translate well to other playback systems, not because they are anything like audiophile-quality speakers. Yamaha stopped making them a few years ago and prices have gone through the roof for replacement parts. No mastering engineer in their right mind would go near these, but it is almost impossible to find a serious recording studio that doesn't have a pair of those black-and-white little liars on the meter bridge, and a spare in the closet.

When we say the car is a "perfect listening environment," we are similarly talking about personal preference rather than acoustical purity. The tiny, sealed space with big lumps of absorbers surrounded by thinly-covered sheet metal and random little comb-filtering hard surfaces and close, parallel walls of glass right at ear level and multiple speakers placed in a neat little phase-cancelling rectangle is pretty much an acoustician's nightmare, but many a music afficianado's dream. I love to listen to music in my jeep, and it's pretty much a loud metal box with a subwoofer in the back. if a mix doesn't good in there, then it is definitely going back for more work.

How many of your listeners are likely to do most of their listening in a 20x30 room with 15-foot curved ceilings and non-parallel walls and the speakers 6 feet from the walls and acoustical treatments behind the centrally-located listening position? How many of your listeners are likely to do most of their listening on cheap headphones on the subway? How many of them are likely to have it playing in the background at work a crappy boombox while they fix cars or load cases of vegetables onto trucks from a refrigerated warehouse? How about blaring out of an overdriven mono PA in a nightclub with 110dB noise floor even without the music?

If your music is going to be heard at all, then it will likely be heard in a place. What kind of place? There's no way to tell for sure, but it's probably worth giving at least a little consideration to the possiblity that the place may be acoustically different from your control room. Which is why we check mixes in mono, and on different playback systems. And I think that most mixing engineers tend to agree that in the car is one of the acid-test listening environments.

Cheers.