A question to the Sound Engineers out there

In addition to the high quality studio monitors, many mixing studios in the analogue to early digital era also used Auratone speakers for near field mixing. Small box-shaped speakers that were perfect for how the mix would sound on the radio, typical home stereos, boom boxes.
Producers and clients wanted to hear the recording on the large monitors, but the engineer would always check the mix on the Auratones.

raysmtb1

Your reply reminded me of the movie That Thing You Do!, where they recorded the released track in a church.

Most albums are mixed for listening in cars or radio or earbuds these days. The artists must hear the playback and it must be loud and punchy. Serious music may be recorded with critical listeners in mind, if we're lucky. Listen to the Lori Lieberman and Jennifer Warnes albums to hear good work.

I must admit that I have found a lot of current music is mixed quite well, with excellent imaging and separation of performers - so they seem to be doing something right regardless of their studio environment.

I guess what prompted my OP is - I had just made some upgrades to cables that improved the sound of my system dramatically, but the level of venue acoustics on a couple of tracks now seemed a little over the top, so it got me wondering what gear the sound engineers used. They were obviously overshooting the mark.

When I looked at studio images, the setup on a great deal of them seemed to lack the "precision" we audio hobbyists might go to with our own systems.

That made me wonder how could they possibly create great sounding studio tracks that make you think that are actually recorded in a hall of some sort, without having a great sounding system that is correctly setup?

I guess there are some sound engineers that do go the extra mile for those tracks that sound really amazing.

Regards - Steve

  No doubt there are some wonderful mixes/recordings out there. It is a sad reminder however when you consider that, as mentioned above, much recording is adjusted for the sh***y car radio, or ear buds that the general public will be using to listen with. One of the tricks is to really compress and then highten the level of the recording to a degree that it captures your attention just by it's loudness and slam. sigh.