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Comment by puranjay | Hacker News Reader

I'm an amateur musician. One of the more common pieces of advice you'll see floating around in the community is to make your music "louder", especially if you're creating electronic music of any form.

Two reasons for this:

1. More and more people are listening to music through equipment that is significantly inferior. Mobile phones, cheap Bluetooth speakers, cheap earphones - they're all subpar in their ability to render sound faithfully.

2. There is a constant "war for loudness". Once you've listened to a David Guetta song that can be ferociously loud, anything not as loud will be perceived as "soft" that "kills the vibe".

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More and more people are listening to music through equipment that is significantly inferior.

I cannot imagine that this is true. Even listening to Spotify on a cheap phone using the headphones that came with the phone offers far better sound quality than listening to the nth generation tape copies on the cheap tape players or the bad reception of the tinny radios that we used to have.

You're forgetting that the vast majority of consumers use cheap Android phones and the earphones packaged with them.

This gear usually has very poor mid-range response. Hence, producers crowd tracks in the bottom-end (bass) and treble ranges. Try listening to a track with a cheap $15 earphones and then with a set of studio headphones like ATH-M50x and you'll hear what I mean.

Ha! If even the packaged earphones.

Forget Spotify. People are listening to music on throttled YouTube.

Compression wasn't the antagonist of music. Not even the consumer's general cheapness is the antagonist. The website that pirated it all, and then got bought by a parent company larger than the market value of the entire music industry combined, is the antagonist of music.

It makes my life miserable. I love writing music but mixing is just a boring, unsexy grind. And it's a skill that takes way too much time to develop - you can't "hack it".

I've produced tracks that sound incredible to me on my 6" Yamaha monitors. Then I send them over to friends who listen to them on their tinny laptop speakers and wonder what the big deal is.

Your 6" Yamahas are not a neutral reference.

Studios deliberately use bad speakers (NS10s, Auratones) to check for this.

In the business it's called "translation" - a good mix sounds good on everything from earbuds to a car stereo to $$$$$$ hifi.

It's almost impossible to make a mix that translates without spending a lot of money on neutral monitors and acoustic treatment.

But there are tricks you can use to make a mix translate better. E.g. You can cut the lowest octave or two in the bass, because no one (outside of a club) can hear it anyway, and use bass sounds with plenty of mids, so you can hear the line even when the low bass isn't there.

Every mixer I ever met did 2 things. 1. Played the mix on a cheap cellphone (this used to be a boombox or 80s wire loop headphones), and a bad car stereo or 2. Listened on Car stereos, as they have whack eqs and soundstage, and will bring out any hint of ugly. Tiny speakers will distort readily, and pop music must sitll sound decent when abused, because omg ppl abuse it. For a club track, you optimise differently, but err on the side of sounding good on crappy radio speakers always otherwise.

Yeah, I'm learning this along the way. Mixing is just a completely different skill set than production or composition. I've realized that it's better to let professionals handle it than learning it - it requires too much investment in equipment and far too much time in training to do it by yourself.

Auratones are not bad speakers though. They're single driver and non-ported. That has implications, namely better low end response, and uniformity in the waveform: ie. no notching from cutoffs; sound comes from one place instead of two (better spatial representation), and also a lot of consumer audio is on single driver setups (earbuds, laptop speaker, p much anything that doesn't have a dedicated tweeter or subwoofer).

When mastering, after I'm happy on my high-end near-field monitors and acoustic room, I haul my studio laptop into every other system and environment I have and tweak accordingly. (i.e. Bose Companion 3, an older JVC shelf stereo, my car stereos, various headphones including ATH-M30, cheap iPod, and Beats, etc etc etc) for this very reason... almost nobody is listening on a nice set of nearly-neutral near-field monitors except other musicians. When done, I make sure I'm still happy on the main rig.

Someday I hope to be experienced enough to just know what to do though, without all the extra work. I haven't found a systematic answer yet.

ouch. too real.

Oh you are all so naive. They listen through the built in speakers on their cheap Android phone. In mono. On the bus. And everywhere else.

No, that's not what the vast majority of users does.

Maybe, but its a big enough use case to be optimized for imho.

Yeah but most people had some stack system or separates at home as well as the walkman or tinny radio. Often horrible by hifi standards, almost always better than the tiny bluetooth speaker, or included headphones. When you went out you knew the walkman or car was second best, but enough background noise that it was still OK.

Parents had separates, they wouldn't take kindly to me blasting out whatever in the living room though.

Yes. This. Compress and EQ everything, if you're trying to get a lot of listeners. You'll have to sacrifice dynamic range for it, but sometimes you have to make a trade-off.

Link up with a producer if you don't know how to do it yourself, if you want a fighting chance.

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