Checking mixes in your vehicle

[Leo Rapture]

Okay, so obviously, this is a good thing to do for many reasons, and unless you have a ton of different references in your home, this can sometimes save your butt when you have a deadline to meet. Aside from all the good uses for checking your mix in the car, let's talk about one of the "bad" things about it.

Obviously, the most ideal way to listen to a mix in the car is on an audio cd that you burned the audio files to. But, this can be expensive, and time consuming. Most people I know take their mix out with an ipod, iphone, or android device, and hook in through the headphone jack. I am guilty of this same exact thing, and until now, I haven't asked this question to myself, but I just witnessed first hand how it can leave you with inaccurate results.

Okay, so your car radio has a volume knob, right? Well, so does your ipod, or cellular phone, when pulling up music on it. How do you know when the signals are blended to give you the most accurate picture of your mix? If the volume on your phone or ipod is tuned down slightly, it could take away some of the low end you are checking for, and vice versa if it's cranked, making your low end way too muddy. Even with the high end, you can turn your phone down to 1/4 volume, and blast your car radio volume knob, and still the music will be very soft, emphasizing treble, and lacking detail.

How do you find this perfect medium so your hearing exactly what you think your hearing in the car? Sure, you can guess, but who likes guessing when it comes to mixing. You want it to be as best as it can be, and this particular problem may be hurting your mixes, and mine! It could be causing you to make unnecessary changes to your mix, and so forth.

To conclude, I'd like to hear your experience, and perhaps your findings on a good remedy to suppress this problem a bit. It's kinda bugging me

[cryophonik]

I always burn mine to CDs. I don't think it's expensive or time-consuming. I reference them in my car against commercial CDs.

[Leo Rapture]

I always burn mine to CDs. I don't think it's expensive or time-consuming. I reference them in my car against commercial CDs.

In the .mp3 infested world we live in, 80% of music listened to nowadays is in .mp3 format. I take into consideration that the majority of the people listening won't have the luxury of hearing the audio in 24-bit, 96 kHz .wav format. With that being said, I tend to mix/master more towards making the lower quality .mp3 file sound better, if that makes any sense. Have you ever heard of something they call,"mastered for itunes", well, the same thing is done during the mix. More and more people are mixing/mastering to reflect a gorgeous 320 kbps .mp3 file, including myself. You should take this into consideration, because eventually, CD's will go bye-bye. The digital realm is taking over, slowly, but surely.

[BertKoor]

I don't know about iDevices, but usually a volume knob has no influence on the bass & treble. I would recommend to use RMAA to analyse the output DAC of your device at different volume settings to debunk this (and establish weather it's any good or not)

CD's will go bye-bye. The digital realm is taking over

Since when are CDs not digital?

[Loki Fuego]

Okay, so your car radio has a volume knob, right? Well, so does your ipod, or cellular phone, when pulling up music on it. How do you know when the signals are blended to give you the most accurate picture of your mix? If the volume on your phone or ipod is tuned down slightly, it could take away some of the low end you are checking for, and vice versa if it's cranked, making your low end way too muddy. Even with the high end, you can turn your phone down to 1/4 volume, and blast your car radio volume knob, and still the music will be very soft, emphasizing treble, and lacking detail.

I always thought that the main point of listening on car radio was to listen to your track in real world scenario. Thus it doesn't matter how accurate the picture is, as the main goal is to reference your track to other tracks playing in the same environment.

[Keith99]

Exactly what Loki said. As long as you replicate the same settings the whole point is that the sound is quite different and poorer than your monitors. I stick my stuff on a USB stick in MP3 format and listen to it on the way in to work