Tag Archive for: Audeze

Side Effects

Took the COVID shot on Thursday and definitely feeling the side effects from the injection. Headaches, fatigue, lightheaded. Should pass in a day or two.

On my job jar is to integrate my new monitoring system into my production workflow but I’m not feeling well enough to go at it full throttle.

The Audeze LCD-X phones arrived on Thursday.

I use Canopener and SoundID and I was able to get SoundID calibrated for the new phones — very quick and easy. Although the LCD-X phones seem very flat and revealing out of the box, SoundID pushed them just a bit further along.

Canopener is a crossfeed plugin which I have used before when mixing through headphones. It is a neutral plugin and the combination of the two plugins seems to be the way to go. I haven’t had a chance to work up some sessions yet using that combination.

Once I get back to feeling normal I will give it a try.

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.