New Monitors

How to mix loud and proud in a condo suite? That is a bit of an issue.

I sold off most of my studio gear when I retired a few years back. We now live in a condo. It is a very nice space but certainly not the ideal location for building out a critical listening room.

I have a 10×14 room with some panels on the wall and a pair of Focal Solo6 Be monitors.

The rig looks like this:

I have zero issues with most of the usual mix activities: prepping and organizing session files, editing tracks and cutting rough mixes. I make pretty heavy use of reference tracks for testing portability and for that I have to jump into headphones for balance especially in the low end. The Focals claim to get down as far as 40Hz but in the listening space I don’t get much below 70Hz. And when I say I don’t get much, I am down somewhere around 10-15 dB by the time 60Hz rolls around.

Likely the room. I’m probably in some kind of null. It’s like someone turned off the bass.

Headphones are the only way for me to check the low end.

But now I am getting asked to deliver Atmos mixes.

What to do?

I can’t readily fit a 7.1.4 system in this space and I certainly don’t want to invest the capital needed to treat the room to an acceptable level. I’m not even sure that I could.

More and more mixers are using headphones not only for the Quality Control but to do most of their mix activities particularly for Atmos.

I have been using a pair of AKG K702 Reference Headphones and they have been okay. With new projects on the go I decided not to spend the money to update the room and add a bunch of speakers.

Rather I will update the headphone monitoring system.

After a lot of research I decided to go with the Audeze LCD-X phones along with the software to provide cross feed for the stereo mixes. For Atmos I am using the Dolby Renderer which doesn’t require the cross feed processing.

I’ll still be checking the mixes on a variety of playback devices but looking forward to mixing with the Audeze phones.