“I recently purchased a really good (expensive) set of studio monitors for my studio, but I still find that my mixes sound drastically different as I listen to them on other systems. What am I missing?”

While the studio monitors themselves are probably the single greatest cause of this problem, there are a number of other related factors that can have a significant impact. We’ll address three of them here.

1) Acoustic Treatment: It’s safe to assume that the decisions you make while tracking, editing and mixing are based on what you hear. If you’re mixing in a room that has detrimental reflections like standing waves, flutter echoes and low frequency room modes (and nearly EVERY rectangular room does!), then it’s nearly impossible to hear the mix without being influenced by these common sound issues.

In other words, you might over or under compensate low frequencies, or the placement of lead vocals in a mix - and that’s just the start! The good news is that by implementing the proper acoustical treatments, you can make even the worst sounding room good enough to be useful. Controlling reflections yields truer sound and allows the “real” sound of an instrument or voice to come through.

Beyond the physical construction of the room, which at this point we’ll assume you don’t have a lot of control over, the two methods of controlling sound are sound absorption and sound diffusion (we shouldn’t forget about bass traps, but those technically fall into the category of absorption). Companies like Auralex and RPG have world-class acoustic treatment solutions that are both affordable and amazingly effective.

2) Decouple Your Monitors: Everything in your studio that vibrates contributes artifacts to the sound of your mix. Typically our monitors are acoustically coupled to a shelf, a rack, stand, or the meter bridge of our mixing boards. Doing this automatically degrades the accuracy of what you’re hearing. And once your monitors cause whatever they’re resting on to vibrate, everything else that’s in physical contact with your monitors also starts to vibrate, which just adds to the problem. Auralex makes a nifty and inexpensive product to address this called the MoPAD.

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