# Are You Listening? Ep. 2 | Your Listening Environment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1LcjVdMMTA

[00:00] Welcome to another episode of Are You Listening?
[00:03] Today we're going to talk a little bit about how you listen, what you listen to, and your environment.
[00:09] Please look at the iZotope website to find companion blogs, videos, other educational materials.
[00:15] And today I want to spend a little time talking about your environment and how to set it up and some strategies for setting it up, because ultimately what you hear is what matters most.
[00:26] So we're looking to develop our brains and tune our brains to what the stimulus is, right?
[00:31] What you're listening to.
[00:32] Which means you got to pay attention to the setup.
[00:34] So I'm going to call this next section: you can't hear the truth through rose-colored glasses.
[00:40] I'm mixing metaphors here, right, but you got to get the point.
[00:45] If there's something about your listening environment that either enhances what you hear in a way that somehow hides the truth, or it filters out some information and doesn't allow you to hear everything that's present in your track, mastering you're going to have problems.
[01:01] You're going to be surprised.
[01:03] Either what you're doing isn't going to translate well out into the world or, and this is kind of a sneaky thing that happens sometimes, your processors, compressors especially, might misbehave because of something in your mix that is causing it to misbehave that you can't necessarily hear.
[01:23] To give you an example of what I'm talking about, give a listen to the following example.
[01:28] I have created, it's not a particularly musical example, but created a version of a song where you hear the mix and there's a 40 Hertz pulse that happens at the beginning every three or four seconds or so.
[01:42] Give a listen to see what you notice.
[02:07] So if you listen carefully would you probably heard is that the audio that you could hear was ducking and it was ducking in response to this 40 Hertz tone and my guess is that many of you in your listening environment couldn't hear the 40 Hertz tone.
[02:24] So, we got a challenge here.
[02:26] We're witnessing a symptom of something being problematic about the audio but we can't hear the cause, right, now I think everybody probably recognizes what the issue is here now if you can see behind me I've gotten really big speakers and a really big room to support them and lots of low-frequency resolution so I can hear everything in the audio spectrum so I wouldn't be surprised if you were saying yourself well that's fine but I can't afford your big speakers and I understand that.
[02:52] So what are some things that you can do to help you compensate for that.
[02:56] Let's talk for a minute about headphones.
[02:58] Headphones are a wonderful tool to complement your main monitoring environment.
[03:04] They can give you a relatively inexpensive way of getting a good shot at hearing the
[03:10] Full spectrum and diagnosing problems that may be a little bit hard or impossible to hear in your main monitors in your room.
[03:17] So I would definitely advocate as a wise investment for getting some decent headphones.
[03:23] It wouldn't surprise me if you end up spending $150 or $200 at the lower end to get something that's got good resolution through the bass.
[03:31] Having said that, I think as a general proposition, most people accept that or believe that it's better to listen through speakers than headphones.
[03:39] There are things about headphones that are unusual in that they cover your ear and they prevent what's called crossfeed from the right speaker to the left ear, the left speaker to the right ear, as well as the closer, more direct path.
[03:54] And while there are bits of software, sometimes it's built into playback devices, D to A converters, to help simulate this idea of crossfeed, you should just know that if you do most of your working on headphones, you may make mistakes regarding imaging and maybe even tone, so that a recording...
[04:13] My translate well to other people wearing headphones but not necessarily so well out into environments where people are listening through speakers whether it's handheld speakers or in rooms where there are speakers playing out into the air.
[04:26] Rule of thumb, use speakers but feel free to use headphones to augment your ability to hear what you need to hear.
[04:35] So assuming that you've done the best that you can with your listening hardware and your listening environment we need to think about what you're going to use to measure what you're doing against.
[04:46] What you're going to use her as a reference.
[04:47] Y know, the same way that all of us have developed this internalized reference of what a guitar sounds like or what a drum sounds like, we weren't born knowing we learned that by reptition over and over and over again a guitar plays and you're like oh that's a guitar.
[05:04] Mastering engineers and people who do mastering if they practice enough they begin to develop an internalized reference of level and tone but that comes through practice and repeated.
[05:16] exposure.
[05:17] If we are going to develop this internalized reference we need to develop a series of reference materials to help us begin to understand what good tonal balance sounds like and what proper level sounds like.
[05:32] So I’m going to talk about it some of the strategies for doing that.
[05:36] So the first thing is you want to begin to collect or curate a library of material that sounds good to you and will post a link to a Spotify playlist that you can go to and listen to good sounding mixes a good sounding masters.
[05:52] But I would encourage you to start to develop your own library of files.
[05:56] It’s important to think about where those files come from.
[06:00] If you were to record the stream coming from a streaming service they all play at different levels and at different qualities of fidelity so if you're not careful about selecting good material to use as reference material to help you educate your ears you may be calibrating.
[06:21] to something that's actually not the best case.
[06:23] It may actually play back quieter than what the original master was in which case it would lead you to a wrong conclusion or loud or distorted or what have you.
[06:33] So couple of guidelines here first of all if you're going to curate a library collect a series of files that you download directly whether it's from iTunes or whether it's from one of the high resolution file websites where you can buy a lossless audio or even you know go find some CDs and rip those CDs directly into your library that gives you the best shot of collecting material that sounds as much like the original Master as possible.
[07:06] It won't sound exactly like the highest-resolution version but it'll be close enough for your purposes.
[07:13] So the next thing and this becomes a little bit more challenging, is always playing your audio back through the same reference digital to analog converter, now digital analog converter
[07:23] Is something that shows up in any device that lets you to play digital audio.
[07:29] But if you're playing through a mixer of any sort and you're playing the output of a phone and comparing it to the output of a streaming service and comparing that to the output of a CD player, those are not all the same; they don't all playback the same level and there may be some subtle changes even in the tone that comes out for each.
[07:46] So if you move your reference, you're not actually able to compare what you're actually working with, if that makes sense.
[07:55] Getting a single playback system that you can trust and you can rely on to be your reference for level and tonal balance is incredibly important.
[08:08] Ultimately what we want to do as mastering engineers, the goal, the best outcome would be to be able to sit down at your system when you're about to master something, hit space bar and immediately know oh that needs to be brighter and it needs to be louder, or
[08:26] That's loud enough, but it needs a little bit more compression or, you know, whatever it is to be able to make those instantaneous judgments.
[08:32] The best way to do that is to know, walking in, what the playback level of your system is and not change it.
[08:40] When you listen to mixing tutorials, it's not unusual to hear the advice: "Sometimes I turn it up for a while to get a better shot at the bass; sometimes I turn it down for a while so I make sure I can hear the vocals in the context of the mix."
[08:54] There are a lot of reasons for varying playback level in mixing.
[08:58] In mastering, if we just leave our playback level static and you hit play, then you will get whatever playback level you have for your system.
[09:05] You come back the next day and play back a different track, and if it's a lot louder, you'll know that instantly 'cause you haven't mucked around with a playback level, okay.
[09:14] So how do you do that?
[09:21] Get 12 tracks, 10, 12 tracks from a variety of records from your favorite genre and load them all into...
[09:28] A timeline in your DAW.
[09:30] And then do a needle drop, by needle drop on me and just take your playback head and park it, you know, in almost the loudest section where the hottest section of each one of the tracks.
[09:42] You probably noticed, if they're well mastered, that the level of the sound coming from your playback system doesn't change a lot.
[09:47] You can go from track to track to track and not mess around with the playback level.
[09:55] Get your SPL (sound pressure level measuring) device.
[10:01] People is a phone with a sound pressure level meter; you can get a whole bunch of different software or app sound pressure level meters that work on a phone.
[10:08] Hold it about, well, more or less where your head would be when you're listening, and as you're going from track to track, look at the readout, and what you want to end up with is something in the neighborhood of 85 DB SPL.
[10:23] That's kind of the magic number; you can be a little more or a little less, but 85 DB SPL.
[10:30] is a great target because that's where our hearing is the most even you won't fatigue when listening at that level and it's a good point of reference.
[10:41] You adjust the playback on your machine playing back those tracks to 85 DB SPL and now take a mix and put it in the timeline and hit play and you will notice that it doesn't sound like everything else in your timeline.
[10:54] It will become immediately clear what way it's different okay...
[10:59] So you begin to notice “oh I see everything that's mastered sits at this level and has a certain total balance to it I know now when I listen to something else I'm about to master what I need to do with that track to make it sound more like everything else in that timeline”
[11:16] Once you got that make a note whether it's a mental note of where in the software control your playback level is or if you have a hardware controller as I do here in the studio make a note of the position of the playback level, that is your mastering.
[11:34] So anytime you sit down the master something you put your playback level in that setting.
[11:39] And that's your starting point and now immediately you'll have a sense of what you need to do to adjust the level and ultimately to adjust the tone of the track.
[11:48] At the same time once you got that set up, take a look at the meter that's present at the output of your DAW when you're playing your track you'll notice that the average level of the tracks you're playing are sitting at more or less the same volume whether it's -10 or -12 dbfs you can make a mental note of that and now...well mastered equals 85 DB in the air equals -12 on your meter and you've made this equivalency and you can use that as a point of reference to inform what you do in your mastering work.
[12:29] All right so I'm going to call this next section your echo chamber you live in your own echo.
[12:34] Chamber of thought.
[12:36] One of the greatest challenges when you are trying to master your own mixes is to revisit decisions that you've made and do something different.
[12:47] One of the advantages of collaborating with the mastering engineer that somebody else is they can listen to what you've done and they hear it differently, they hear in a different environment, and they hear it in a different context which is their own experience and their own brain.
[13:04] So if you spent hours and hours and hours in a mix making something sound the way you wanted to sound, why would you then change it in mastering?
[13:09] Now if you got a great mix, you may not want to change very much; you may want to just a little bit more high end or a little bit more bass, you may want to change the level a little bit, and we're good to go.
[13:16] In that case fine, but you do miss the advantage of that collaboration.
[13:25] Here's a weird trick that I like to use, actually not a weird trick but I have a weird idea.
[13:31] So the trick is after you've been working on a track for a while, go find somebody else.
[13:37] In the house in the hallway put him off the street I don't know by him a lemonade to get.
[13:42] Them to come in and sit down next to you in the studio.
[13:45] They don't have to say anything but just by inviting someone else to come in and sit next to you for me it changes my brain and I hear things differently it's almost as if I can hear it through their ears and sometimes the thing that's obvious that I totally missed because I'm so focused on something else becomes apparent to me.
[14:09] Now I'm going to spend a minute or two talking about your studio setup there's so much literature out there and there's so much to be said about room acoustics and design sometimes there are things that you can do to improve your environment that cost nothing at all or very little.
[14:28] If you want to build the perfect room chances are you probably can't make a business plan to support that but anyway I don't want to be presumptuous but let's talk about some of the basic core ideas around setting up a listening environment.
[14:40] Most people are familiar with these, but the first thing is make sure that your listening environment is set up in such a way that you are equidistant from the speakers.
[14:43] You've got an equilateral triangle between speakers in your ears, and that you have some symmetry in terms of where you are positioned in a room.
[14:57] If you're all the way off to one side so that you're closer to a boundary on one side of the stereo image than the other, that will certainly cause you to hear things in a way that's less accurate.
[15:08] You'll get comb filtering, another kind of sound pollution, from one direction compared to the other, so symmetry is important.
[15:16] The worst place to listen in most environments is right in the middle of the room, because all of the unevenness, the room modes, are going to collide to the greatest extent in the geographical center of your room.
[15:32] So you can be about a third of the way back from the front wall or two-thirds of the way back from the front wall; those are better starting points.
[15:40] Don't put your speakers right next to a boundary, because right next to a boundary unless you...
[15:44] I feel like there's a deficiency in the bass, the boundary will exaggerate the low frequency response and if you put your speaker in a corner it's going to be that much worse.
[15:54] You'll get basically double that phenomenon.
[15:58] So those are a few basic ideas, maybe one more to consider is if you have the luxury is to set up your playback system so that the front plane the stereo image is oriented across the narrow wall and not the wide wall.
[16:15] That way the first reflection coming off the wall behind you will take longer to get back to you and that first reflected sound is the one that has the greatest possibility of interacting with what you hear coming from your speakers.
[16:30] It’s one of the reasons that you'll find people relying more on midfielder near-field speakers to eliminate the influence of the room but in an ideal world you have a great room and great speakers and you can back off a little bit and you get the best shot of hearing everything in the sound a good proportion.
[16:45] I'm going to call this next section you can't clean your kitchen floor with a dirty mop.
[16:53] The point is that we want to have the most control in mastering of the result.
[16:59] And if we're using gear that has a particular kind of color that comes from a particular kind of distortion, not that there aren't times and places for that, but in general your toolbox should be full of gear that allows you to only make the change you want to make and not add anything.
[17:18] The problem with colorful gear in mastering is that if it imparts a particular kind of color, the assumption is that that kind of color would suit every recording.
[17:28] And every genre and everything that you're doing.
[17:31] Now if you master your own material and you're only making one genre — and I'll just say you, but say it's electronic dance music of some sort or other — and you get a little bit more upper harmonic edge from the EQ that you use, that might be a cool thing, but if...
[17:47] You want to be versatile and be able to treat lots of different kinds of material and maybe have the opportunity to not impart that edge but make something sound a little bit fuller or bigger or smoother.
[18:04] You want a tool that's cleaner, that's more versatile, that has the option to change the character of the tool.
[18:07] In mastering we tend to seek out tools that are both exacting and also don't have a sound of their own unless we really need color, in which case we'll go looking for it.
[18:21] Thanks for joining me for this episode of Are You Listening.
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[18:37] And please go to the iZotope website, you can feel free to download a free trial of Ozone.
[18:43] And I look forward to seeing you next time.
[18:43] Hope you find this useful.