Yesterday ended up being quite a fluke for me. I did manage to finish up my redo's on "Interstate Blind" which came out nicely, I think, but in the process I managed to hurt my ears and had to stop all work because of it. It's taken almost 24 hours for my ears to calm down. Dumb me for forgetting to put in my ear plugs when I was testing out my larger amps. Just plain dumb and not advisable. I simply must be more careful in the future.
It's been a decent week off and I did make some rewarding progress but it didn't really come in the form of actual recording, unfortunately. I spent the beginning of the week mainly focused on mixes and particularly the issues I've been having with my mixes. I do believe I made some breakthroughs but it's not quite all the way to my satisfaction, as of yet.
Also, I found that the internet database info for the "...Miss You Most..." CD is a bit messed up and I had to send an email to find out how to correct it. It seems whomever entered the info online both misspelled my name as well as called the album "I Miss You...", literally with the '...', like they were too lazy to type it all in. Nice, huh? Yeah, don't get me started. I believe it's a simple fix but I'll have to wait to hear what the deal is.
And so, on to speaker-land... As previously stated, I purchased a Denon DRA-800H receiver so that I could have the USB input on it which is what I was after so I could easily try out mixes without burning them always to CD. I made the mistake (or good fortune) to also purchase new speakers, the first set being Polk R500's. They felt really small sounding to me, and even after buying a subwoofer (which I'm pretty much deeply against having), the overall sound just wasn't what I was looking for. They did, however, show a ton of the blemishes in my mixes surprisingly. Wow! And so, I then purchased Klipsch RP 8000-F's which are flat out enormous and heavier than you could ever imagine and returned the Polk's. The Klipsch sound big, full, and are the most critical sounding speakers I've ever experienced, meaning not only do my mixes sound harsh and exposed of every issue but so do all actual professional CD's. I mean, it's completely bizarre! It made me wonder why anyone would want speakers to sound like this. Are we trying to ruin music in general? However, I also learned that if I can make my mixes sound good on these critical speakers they'll probably sound good anywhere, no? They are huge, though, and I must say that I don't really enjoy listening to music on them so they're not exactly ideal. Hmm.
Thus, speaker set #3 enters the picture. I know, this is getting absurd, right? I am now trying out Polk R600's which are the bigger brother to the previous Polk's that I tried. These actually sound pretty good to me but my problem with them is that they don't actually accentuate mix issues like the Klipsch. I would much prefer to listen to music on these, however, so I have a bit of a dilemma here that I'm not entirely sure yet on what I'm going to do.
To make things even more complex, I just happened to stumble upon a receiver by a brand called Outlaw Audio that seemed right up my alley since I'm rather old school in my thinking. This is on its way now and I'll have to reevaluate everything once it arrives. It's just about the only receiver I have found that will allow you to run an outboard EQ through it (I guess this is considered taboo these days) and it also doesn't require the USB port to be searching for a WIFI connection, of which this 'feature' actually caused the Denon to need a complete reset just last week which frankly scared me. It also wasted 30 minutes of my time that day, trying to diagnose the problem.
Now, I am proudly not a so called "audiophile". In fact, I think the whole thing is a bit on the silly side and meant for people with simply way too much money. It does seem, though, that the audiophile logic is that they want mixes to sound critical and a bit harsh, supposedly exactly like they originally sounded (which I do question that thinking, to be honest). Older speakers ala the 80's and 90's were designed to smooth things out and accentuate certain aspects of mixes, thus making them sound better on particular systems. It's just another example of how I don't understand modern thinking and/or technology, and why anyone would want to make albums deliberately sound worse is simply beyond my thinking. Albeit, it may help me in mixing, so...
Coupled with all of this, it dawned on me that I really need to investigate just getting better studio monitors, of which I did actually do. I purchased the Focal Trio6's at a decent price but unfortunately the person who I bought them from didn't package them well, and so one of the speaker cabs has a few issues in terms of scratching, etc. I have found the monitors to be a major step upward, though, and coupled with some of the work I've done on bass and drums in general over the past 2 weeks, I do attribute them to bringing my mixing skills hopefully to a new and better level. The whole goal, after all, is to get music done, from start to finish, in a much quicker and more reasonable fashion. Hopefully, I'm starting to go down the right path.
So, there you have it. A lot of useless info, no less, but these have been my recent adventures in so called "Hi-Fi". Now, back to the match...
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