This is related to my previous post. The other day, reading Hometracked I found a link to this article about acoustics and found, to my surprise, that what I instinctively did, checking my mix in the car, wasn’t such a bad idea after all. That way I heard that the bottom end frequencies were exaggerated compared to the rest of the mix, this is explained by the effect of small rooms acoustics on the listener’s perception. I overcompensated the lack of bass in my room by applying more bass in the mix.

Fortunately, listening to it in the car provided a different perspective. I spend hours every week driving so I know its frequency response very well and I knew straightaway by listening to the mix that the bass and kick were too loud. So I went back home, reduced those instruments’ volume by a few dB’s, bounced the mix and back to the car. Then repeated this process until I was happy with the results. It was definitely worth the effort.

This is what the article said about it:

I want to share with you some conventional wisdom that is valid, in spite of the fact that few people understand why. Many recordists who don’t have proper acoustic treatment have learned to play mixes in their cars in order to get a better sense of the bass levels. Of course, most car stereos are a poor second to a good pair of monitor speakers. Yet that method works surprisingly well, discounting the nuisance of having to keep burning CD-Rs to play in your car. Many people think that a car is a good place to assess mixes because we spend so much time listening there, but they also listen through their studio monitors.

The reason is explained in the article. Cars do not have such as bad a low frequencies response as small rooms as the energy just passes through the walls to the outside instead instead of being reflected causing dips in the frequency response. This makes the low frequency response more uniform. Cool.