BasementJack wrote:
SteveG had a great suggestion, but I'll go the other way: Almost everyone listens to "Lo-Fi" these days - I would bet that >50% of all music is consumed on apple Earbuds. So I would start with that - at least that way, you know that what you hear, is exactly what anyone with an iphone/ipod would hear. Once THAT mix sounds good, then it's time to visit the car or another source to be sure that you didn't miss something.
If that was such a good idea, then why don't commercial studios work like that? They don't, simply because there is no way that you can get stereo imaging sorted out like this. If you do that on monitor speakers that have been set up correctly, it works fine for ear-buds. The other way around, it simply doesn't - you simply can't get anything near the centre positioned accurately.
And I'm not convinced that a) +50% of all music is listened to on apple ear-buds, or b) that they are particularly accurate. My limited experience of them is that they make everything sound too bright, which means that they aren't even attempting to be accurate. The good thing about using even cheap monitors is that an attempt will have been made for them to be moderately truthful. What this means in practice is that if you can actually get your mix to sound good on truthful monitors, it's going to sound great on just about anything else. If you mix on over-forgiving ear-buds, I can guarantee that this will never happen, because you'll miss the stuff that they inevitably mask, and that you should have attended to.
