All my career I have mixed using Genelec monitors and more specifically, the 1031a. I don’t use them because they have a special Mojo that other monitors don’t. I use them because they are what I started on, grown accustomed to and know very well. Or so I thought…
One day, I decided to turn a room in the house into a special mix room where I could take on mixing projects and edit my daughter’s figure skating music. My choice for the room was the Genelec 1030a because of the size of the room and my familiarity with the Genelec sound I thought the smaller 1030a would be a good fit.
I did some treatment to help deaden the room and keep unwanted reflections down. So I’m good to go.
Up until recently every mix project I did was mastered by someone else, so I would mix and ship the files off not knowing what anything sounded like outside my room. I mean I’m mixing on Genelec’s there’s no problem…right? Some time later, a shiny new cd comes back sounding all nice and polished and perfect. Magic.
Last December I took on a project for a friend, Matt Swaringim. You can read more about that on my page called “Remixing 101”. I wrote about how great the project was turning out, using new software and how great I thought the record was turning out. It sounded really good! I was proud of my work. Then came mastering time. Because of budget I agreed that I would master the project myself. That was a big mistake that I’m glad happened.
With the mixes all leveled and tonally balanced I took a cd out to my car and went for a drive, popped my cd in and WAIT!!! There’s something wrong with the stereo! What’s with all the low mid stuff…are the tweeters blown?? I checked the cars EQ, everything looked fine there, put in another cd and that one sounded good. I even sent a song to a friend for him to check out at his place, yep…mud. Uh, oh. Great, there something wrong with the speakers! Now I’m going to have to compensate for the speaker’s anomalies.
I start shooting in the dark making EQ changes to stuff I can’t hear, taking cd’s out to the car and other places to make adjustments, because now, I can’t trust my speakers. I had felt like someone had told me there was no Santa Clause. I didn’t know who or what to trust. My confidence was shaken.
I started to bemoan the fact that I hated mastering and my speakers weren’t true an Facebook and a popular audio engineering forum. With some good advice given from friends and colleagues I took a step back and looked at the situation. I took my speakers to another place and listened to them there. I could hear a difference.Could it be that my room is not properly treated? Could the problem lie with acoustics and not the equipment? Hmmm, time to investigate. One thing I did not do is put treatment on the wall behind the speakers because I thought because the speakers were smaller, they wouldn’t need it. My reasoning does not change the laws of physics. By blind luck the first thing I do is look at the relationship of the speaker to the back wall.
Genelec makes this really cool tool called Acoustitape.
It’s a handy little tool that works like measuring tape but instead of inches, shows wavelength. There is a guide on the tape that shows you the quarter wavelengths where if you measure the distance form the front of your speaker to the back wall it gives you the wavelength and the quarter wave that would actually be a cancelling frequency due to reflections off the wall.
I got my handy dandy Acoustitape and measured from the front off the speaker to the back wall. The distance is exactly 800Hz, quarter wave…the frequency that will disappear… 200Hz. There’s my mud. I had too much 200 to 220 because that frequency was actually cancelling at the speaker and I couldn’t here it.
What I ended up doing was bringing the speakers closer together because they were very wide and putting treatment on the wall behind them to stop the reflections. It’s amazing how much that one little adjustment…the proper adjustment helped. The speakers now sound like I expect they should and the imaging and clarity are also improved. This is how amazing reference monitors should sound. This is what I expect from a company the caliber of Genelec. I was doubting almost everything but how I had them set up. Some times you just can’t fight mother nature.
