just tried my stuff on a diffrent system

L

Lil Loco

Guest
hey FP.
ive just burned some of my trackz to CD and put them in my system i use in my bedroom.
(hope i explain this clear enough)
but it doesnt sound clear if u get me, sound slighly muffled....
when i mix with my headphones on it sounds fine.
but when its on the other system it dont.

what can i do to get around this problem?

any advice would be great.

Thankz


Lil Loco
 
on second look at it, i think im looking for that prof. sound (stero sound)
but that mite be something completly diffrent.

im new to the game of mixing. :)
 
wow. . .
now i know where i am goin wrong. lol.
one i need to get me some monitors.
and i now have a better idea of how to use panning, EQ, Fader Level to make my stuff sound alot better. lol

thankz, its helped loads.

also i use a laptop (im a broke ass student). does it make a huge diffrence i dnt have a good sound card (i think it prob does). and what external sound cards are there for me to use, that are not to expensive?

thankz again.

LL
 
Yes, soundcards make a big difference in sound (even potential performance gain). Also, even sound drivers make a difference. This is the main reason it would sound different on separate systems.

M-Audio Audiophile usb or firewire are options. There are a couple other decent ones for a tight budget.
 
Keep in mind though, you can make great mixes on a crappy laptop soundcard, I've heard it been done enough times to say this with confidence. It's all a matter of knowing your system, and it's flaws. Basically it just comes down to skill.
That said, of course a good soundcard and good audiodrivers will improve the quality of your mixes. But it can be worked around, if you're good enough.
 
Monitors can fool the crap out of you too...

I dumped a mix that sounded very full and cohesive out of PT... loaded in WMP to play thru my 2.1 systems... lol...

Let's just say the bass was WAY out of line... maybe I wasn't concentrating as i should... you know, sitting in the 'sweet spot'..etc..

But it's more about your ears than the medium...the medium helps, but your ears are teh most important...
 
thankz for all the advice.
but now it seems we have some people saying that its shouldnt matter.
and others saying that monitors would be alot better (anything but headphones).
???
 
Xeeko said:
Keep in mind though, you can make great mixes on a crappy laptop soundcard, I've heard it been done enough times to say this with confidence. It's all a matter of knowing your system, and it's flaws. Basically it just comes down to skill.
That said, of course a good soundcard and good audiodrivers will improve the quality of your mixes. But it can be worked around, if you're good enough.
Click to expand...

This is true... And yes.. It requires A LOT of skill (can be pretty hard to do) and knowing the absolute ins and outs of your system.
 
You can make detailed adjustments with headphones, but you will almost never, except by luck get good mixes with them.

Good or even great monitors can be next to useless in an acoustically untreated room. Think about this one problem. Sound travels at 1 foot/ms if your rear wall is 8 or 10 feet behind you just introduced a 16 to 20 delay into your mix. That alone smears the stereo field causing you to make bad judgments in the mix.

That doesn't even touch on all of the other acoustic problems like standing waves and improper reverb decay in the room.

When it comes to soundcards you can do ok with cheaper cards but it is amazing how much difference comes switching to high end converters.

I disagree that drivers have anything to do with the quality of the recording. Those only affect the efficiency of the system. It won't do anything to the clock jitter inherent to lower priced converters.
 
Tim20 said:

I disagree that drivers have anything to do with the quality of the recording. Those only affect the efficiency of the system. It won't do anything to the clock jitter inherent to lower priced converters.
Click to expand...

That's a good question. I'm pretty sure they do (from experience). The system performance in turn impacts the sound. However, you may be right.
 
I think I know what you are experiencing and I have seen the same thing. My Echo Layla 3G card was a victim of it. The ASIO drivers ran well the WDM drivers caused tracks to waiver off from each other.

A bad driver causes the system to not respond correctly and it, for lack of a better term, just sounds off. A driver revision might make the system as a whole better and it comes across as a tighter sound.

Now that has nothing to do with what was done at the converter level. Take those same wav. files and put them on a more responsive system and it will get better.

The soundcard clock which can be expensive to make a good one, and the how the converter's filters are designed really set the high end and low end products apart. Drivers don't have any bearing on that since those are hardware devices and they are what they are.

I was convinced until recently that digital jitter was not a matter of concern in new products versus those from a few years ago. That is until I got the Aurora 8 and AES 16 installed. Using the AES16 as a master clock made my Layla 3G sound almost as good as the Aurora 8. The differnce in what could be heard in a mix was phenomanal.

I played a commercial CD that I use as one of my references and in a track immediately heard a cymbal crash in the distant background that I never knew was there.
 
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