Why certain recordings and mixes have a giant suckout hole in the midrange..

That looks late 60's vintage, yes? Are we sure this isn't some Altec promo shot? In other words, were they actually mixing/mastering in this studio as seen?

Sadly, even good looking spaces with great speakers can have bad sound because of overlooked or ignored acoustics within the space itself.

 

I am no mixing genius, so please forgive my ignorance if it the case.
I found when i had my own little home studio that my speakers were too good (my assumption) and when i pressed a test copy of a song and went to try it out on little portables, car players and a couple of home systems the mixes were incredibly different and poor, after sounding great on the studio monitors ....

Is it better to have a pair of cruddy speakers and a pair of good speakers for mixing rather than a pair of fantastic speakers?
Or
Am I, Was I just a terrible mixer?

 

I am not exactly sure what your looking for.

1) Speakers/monitors that look like they would sound bad?
2) Speakers/monitors that actually do sound bad (tested and reviewed as such)
3) Bad studio layout?

In addition, if the sound engineer was hearing diminished midrange, wouldn't the end mastering have elevated mids via translation compensation? So candidates for what your asking might be speakers* with too much midrange?

* (elevated midrange response at the listening position)

 

In my (very) limited experience with studio recording, it's good to have both, and to try out your mixes on a variety of setups (even testing out a mix in your car stereo and then going back & tweeking it).

It's why so many studios packed a pair of NS-10's for mix reference.

 

Forgive me if I am remembering this wrong. Many years ago I recall a discussion on this forum about the great Tom Dowd mixing Derek & the Dominos at Criteria Studios on a system whose horns left a midrange "hole" in the audio spectrum. Am I remembering correctly? Were these Altecs?

 

This?

 

Back when I began my session guitaring so-called career ca. 1980, we were working in Kaye-Smith Studios in Seattle ... monitors were some medium-sized things on the meter bridge (Tannoy Golds, prolly) along with the ubiquitous NS10s and Horrortones. Up above in the soffits were some scary-looking things with giant woofers and wooden horns (Westlakes?). During the sessions, those were mainly left silent; "How come?" asks I. "Oh, those are just for impressing clients", quoth Reed the engineer.

Steve Miller was working on something in studio C while were in B; we invited him in to listen to a few of our mixes on the big Westlakes. After three or four tunes, all our hair blown well back, he remarked blandly "No lack of high-end in those tracks ..."

 

If those guys are mixing, isn't it kind of stupid to have FOUR speakers (of any type...) together right in front of you? How do you make mixing "moves"
for right and left channels when everything is one block of sound. That picture is something else.

 

Quad mix, no doubt

 

Yeah, white.

 

Yes and yes to your questions. I remember that same thread. In fact I believe it was Steve who provided the details on the speakers used by Tom Dowd for mixing The Layla album.

 

I totally understand what Steve is saying. The picture (if real) is just an extreme example...
I listen to Klipsch Heresys, and enjoy them, but I would not mix music with them.

 

Steve, what is your favorite speaker to work with (mixing)?

 

My brother in law was excited to find his old JBL L100's, he re-foamed them, cleaned them up, and put them along side of his $6k B&W's...
He told me he was going to do this, and I warned him (without telling him what awful speakers they actually were...) that it would screw up the sound
in his listening room. He figured this out for himself, thankfully.

 

I just commented on Bob Olhsson's post on Facebook about this same system.

I mentioned that I thought those A7's were too close to the listener but he mentioned how common that setup was in the old mono days.

Personally I think Altec 604's were much more suitable for control room monitors, but I really wasn't active until the 70s, so I have no idea which were actually more popular before that. I've seen lots of A7''s in studio's for playback, but those weren't in the control rooms.

I've mixed a lot with both the A7's and the 604e's and I vastly preferred the 604's, especially if they were close.

 

You know, I’d be really curious to hear what that sounded like in person.

 

Yes, those were most likely the 'smith' horns, and Westlake monitors were very popular. At Dawnbreaker we had custom designed monitors by George Augspurger, and they were similar to the Westlakes and also fairly popular in the larger control rooms of my day. They played extremely loud, much louder than the A7's.

The difference though, IMO, is that the wooden horn in the Westlakes and Augspurger designs were designed for shorter throws, while the sectoral horns used in the A7's were more suitable for longer throws.

IMO, you really need some distance to get the high and low horns of the A7's to come into focus, and yes the lows were also coupled with horns, though most don't necessarily consider those bass cabinets to be horns.

Btw, our monitors could play at over 130db, especially when all 4 were on. Often when they were demoing mixes for guests they'd play them that loud, and of course how can you have rear speakers on when you're listening to a stereo mix? I had to leave when those demos occured because it just shot my ears.

If your monitors couldn't play loud, outside engineers would come in and blow them up. That's why I could hear more at home than in the studio. Studio monitors have to play loud and be somewhat indestructible and that was at the expense of delicacy and detail, all my opinion again of course.

 

Many things have evolved over the years including PA systems. For those like myself, who grew up listening to records on primitive record players, I wouldn't have had a clue regarding what would have been a good or bad setup. As the science of audio recording has progressed, many of those in the industry obviously figured out what worked and what didn't work so well. I think that in the beginning it was mostly experimentive and eventually fine tuned using deductive logic and experience. As we look back at what now seems absurd, it may have been looked at the time as cutting edge. Hindsight is 20/20 and I am glad that for the most part, audio engineers have figured out that sometimes less is more.

Believe it or not, back in the day, if you had a pair of those Altec "Voice of the Theater" speaker cabs, they were considered "The Bomb". My! How times of changed.

 

Starting back in the 80s when I began writing/producing radio commercials, we always took a final listen on really crappy speakers to make sure it would sound good on the average car stereo of the day (where most people would hear it). Nowadays car stereos are so much better sounding, I'm not sure there'd be a point anymore. BTW, none of the many studios I've worked in had giant horns—they all had fairly high-end, accurate speakers.

 

Shouldn't this thread be in the Audio Hardware forum?

 

604's in cabinets built for home use are very popular amongst "vintage"-style audiophiles these days, and (I'm told) originals go for huge money.

 

When I ran a studio we did mostly voice over work. With music projects of our own and a few local bands. We had a solid set of JB passive bookshelf sized monitors. L-15s I think? I still use these in my project studio. They are great speakers.

Even with these I had to play the tapes/CDs in my car and my boombox to gauge the mix. The 2-tracks would come out with a thick low end I had to go back an tweak with a 100 band EQ.

 

They were great for my use. They could play loud without a hint of fatigue, and they imaged well, being coaxial. They didn't have the ultra high end shimmer that audiophile speakers can reproduce, but I think they were designed more as a tool and not necessarily a hi-fi speaker, though I'm sure many made it into hi-fi rigs. I'll bet that with the right cabinet, source material, and power, they can still sound very nice, and definitely have the 'vintage' sound.