Sound test
I’ve been doing some mixing on headphones and getting awkward results. To try to get to the bottom of it I thought I should see how bad the phones are coloring the sound I’m getting.
First I tried recording a white noise sample played through mac speakers and headphones thinking that there would be some pretty big differences. There are, but mostly what you see is the loss of low-frequencies (<600Hz) and anything about 12kHz.
It turns out that a chirp is easier to measure and repeat. Here are two spectrograms, first the mac laptop speakers:
Followed by the response of the headphones:
Both are flatter than I would have expected, with deviations under 10dB. The phones actually have a pretty big notch near 2kHz, while the mac speakers are more erattic.
Here’s the prius:
The verical scaling is a little weird. Iztope reads out the delta band as +/-2db or so, but I can make 10 or 20db changes in the input faders and not move these meters much. Hmm…
Bottom line:
- Headphones drastically underestimate the amount of 2kHz and have some other weird frequency holes. Mixing in the car might be a good solution.
- Checking peak hold plots might be a good way to tell what is happening.
So it turns out that the units in the readouts are the green ones on the far left. I.e. the scale in most of the figures is 2.5db/div. This means that 10db excursions based on listening environment are pretty common. Wow.
Comment by joel — August 8, 2010 @ 4:11 pm