Principles of good audio mixing

[Ty Ford]

Brave Heart.

Soundtrack Pro is still a pretty unwieldy program relative to Pro Tools. It DOES have some very neat features though.

Regards,

Ty Ford

[Harold Schreiber]

Hi Kevin,

From your description, it apears that you are mixing for "recording" and not for the reinforcement of the concert - is that right ? One usually does not work for the other.

Are you going to be in a "Sound Booth", or out in the concert arena ?

If in the arena, a great set of accurate isolating head phones would be best.

If in a booth, then the monitor speakers are the ticket.

Depending on your age, how much noise you've been exposed to, and how much you plan to be doing this kind of work, you might consider getting your hearing checked so you have a base line of any hearing loss you may have. If you have any loss at all, highs - lows - midrange, that will skew your tuning results. You won't know it, but those with "normal" hearing will.

Most folks over 30 now-a-days have some loss, and most everyone over 60 does. Most concerts are played well above 85db, the sound level at which hearing damage starts to occur.

I've been working with sound systems for 47yrs, since the "Heath Kit" days.

I now run bilateral hearing aids. How well you can hear does, and will, make a difference in the quality of your mixing ability.

Harold

[Steve House]

Originally Posted by Jonathan Bufkin

I was thinking about getting the JBL LSR's pretty soon. Where did you find the best deal on them? Also are you using the SPDIF inputs or the analog inputs? If the SPDIF...do you control it with software or like any other digital output in your DAW? Does the Room Mode Correction make a huge difference to your ears? These are questions I've been pondering. Thanks for your input...pardon the pun.

Up and running with the JBLs now. I'm just using the analog inputs so far, coming out of the analog output of my Echo AudioFire 8 interface into the Aux returns on a Mackie 1642 for main level control and then out of the Mackie through the control room outs to the JBLs. Mix position is about 1 metre from each speaker. My room is pretty bad - no acoustic treatment and some pretty bad bass resonances, plus one speaker is pretty close to a corner. The RMC feature only took a few minutes to run and cleaned up the sound immensely, especially in the bass. The change in the clarity when switching the RMC equalization in and out using the front panel buttons is very dramatic. Very smooth response over the entire range, instruments and vocals clearly defined and localized, very transparent mid-range, and an even, stable stereo image.

If you do feed them through the digital inputs, there are front panel level buttons on the speakers themselves that control levels and because the speakers all talk to each other through their network, adjusting any single speaker's level adjusts the whole system. And there's also a level control on the supplied remote control. So you have 4 or 5 choices to control levels when using the digital inputs - DAW or playback software output level, soundcard output level, or controlling the speaker's internal amplifier gain using the JBL Control Centre software level control, speaker front panel level control, or speaker remote control level control.