Recording - February 2015 - 42

Part 2: In Your Room

By Paul J. Stamler

In last month's introduction I said that, before digging into the recorded
clip that's the spine of this series, I would talk about elements of recording
that get little attention and respect. I refer to monitors, and the rooms they
sit in.
I'm talking about where you listen, and what you listen on, because
everything passes through there. Every clip I post with these articles, you'll
listen to in your room, on your monitors. More importantly, all the recordings you track and mix, and all the decisions you make about them, will
be based on what you hear on your monitoring setup. If that setup has a
boomy bass or a sizzly high end, you'll shape your decisions about mic
choice and placement, EQ, and mixing on that sound-sometimes unconsciously. And when you listen to your recording somewhere else, or someone else does, it'll sound wrong.

Translation
In audio recording, translation is the name of the
game. If you could guarantee that everyone who listens to your recordings would listen on headphones or
earbuds, you'd be home free. But you can't guarantee
that. You can't even come close; though many recordings will be listened to on the ubiquitous earbuds,
many will be heard in other ways:
~ On big speakers (hopefully good) in the living room
(hopefully quiet).
~ On small, cheesy speakers in a boom box.
~ On even smaller, cheesier speakers attached to a
desktop computer.

All the recordings you track and mix, and all the decisions you
make about them, will be based on what you hear on your monitors.
Cans (and can'ts)
I'll start by addressing a question I often hear from beginning recordists:
"Can't I monitor my tracking and mixes on a good set of headphones?
They're a lot cheaper than monitor speakers, and with headphones there
won't be problems with room acoustics."
In my opinion, you can't. When I gave that answer to our Editor, he
replied with a heartfelt "But I've worked with headphones as my monitors
for years and years!" I did, too; I spent years and years doing remote
recordings, usually in circumstances where headphones were the only possible monitors.
But the operative phrase, for both of us, is "years and years". It is possible to make good recordings and mixes while monitoring on headphones-
but it's a skill that takes years to learn... and I have shelves full of recordings
I made while I was learning that sound awful. Well, awful on anything but
headphones, that is. [And so does said Editor, and he uses them to check
listening detail on headphones under review.-MM]
The big problem is that headphones are too good. A decent monitor
setup lets you hear into the mix, but headphones do this too well; you hear
myriad tiny details that are easy to pick out under the headphones' aural
magnifying glass. Unfortunately, most of those details won't be audible
when you listen to the recording in any other way.
Headphones also create a very different stereo image from loudspeakers; they pump the left channel straight into your left ear, and the right
channel straight into your right ear. In a room, the sounds from the two
speakers combine, and the stereo image your ear hears from speakers
sounds very different from what you'd hear on headphones. Net result: a
recording made using headphones probably won't translate to another listening environment.
42

RECORDING February 2015

~ On 1" speakerlets built into a laptop.
~ On a car stereo, in a noisy environment.
~ (If you get radio airplay) On a clock radio-almost
certainly in mono.
~ (If it's the right musical genre) On huge speakers in
a club.
~ (If you can sell a clip from the song as a ringtone)
On the tiny microspeaker in a cell phone.

Fig1

Recording - February 2015

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