From: Enrique Ocasio
My comments are:
Great website. Your articles are very informative and direct to the point.
One question: What is your advice in EQing a final mix taking in account the growing-population of X-Tra Bass, T-Bass, etc… home stereos and car stereos?
Thanks
Enrique Ocasio
Dear Enrique:
Thanks very much for your comments!
You should try to make your final mix as neutral as possible, as good as possible on a wide range of systems. I’ve listened to a few of these 3-box systems with the T-Bass and they tend to deal with bass in the 70 to 100 Hz range, not extend it down below 60, as they’re just too small to reproduce those fundamentals, so I would not worry about them. Just EQ your mix so it sounds good on an accurate system and it seems to translate to the T-Bass systems almost 10 times out of 10.
Cars are another issue. Many of them have resonances at 70 Hz and below and these cause a bad impression of solid bass notes. Ever since the advent of car stereos with hyped-up woofers, many recordings have been compromised with too light sub bass. Cars have got to get their systems better. I do like the Bose high end car systems, they seem not to be hyped and have accurate low bass. But our Harmon Kardon premium car systems always seem to be artificially boomy.
Be very careful about compromising a recording to sound less boomy in a car or it will sound thin, even on the T-Bass enhanced 3-piece systems, which really do not have any fundamentals as I said.
The better the mix you make sounds on a great system, the more systems it will translate to. And, hopefully, we will in the mastering, help you to NAIL IT!
Hope this helps,
Bob