Audio Myths-Busting series EP.3 "Trust your ears!" (Q&A Clarify Version)
*Beware wall of text* (as always)
"Unfortunately, when you do trust your ears, you're not just trusting your ears"
Q: Trust your ears guide is actually helpful?
A: In my personal experience, Advice like this is undoubtedly the most common and unhelpful piece of non-advice you'll find online is 'trust your ears', which is trotted out with tedious regularity by people who don't actually have a useful answer to your question.
If you read my Audio myths-busting series you know that most adults can’t hear much above 16 kHz, People will lose their ability to detect higher frequencies as you get older, can be affected by conditions such as having a cold or earwax buildup, and suffer from fatigue - but also your audio interface, monitor quality and positioning, and the shape and material of your room and everything in it. This seems sensible enough.
Q: Can I truly trust my ears?
A: One of the absolute most frustrating things about audio production is that you simply can’t trust your ears. The human ear is not a very reliable tool for knowing if your tracks are sounding great or not, plain and simple. Our ears adjust, and our brains compensate for things we’re hearing and very quickly we lose perspective on just what exactly our audio is sounding like.
Myself learning this the hard way... it's very depressing if you're not get used to it, but it just the way it is, This is how our brains work. Accept it and working around them.
Q: If i can't trust my ear, what i can do?
A: One of the best things you can do to reset your ears is to play your mix through a very different set of speakers, cheap earbud, laptop speakers or even your phone.
Try it again with some headphones. Your ears will be fresh to the way your cans sound. But of course after a minute (or less) they will get used to that sound and you’ll lose some perspective.
By switching speakers (even to cheap speakers) you force your ears to “wake up” and start paying close attention to the frequency balance. This state of resetting is so helpful in giving you information you need to make sure your mix is where you want it to be, and you don’t have to spend a lot of money either. Just listen to your mix on something other than your main speakers every now and then, and you’ll be better off for it.
A: Reference tracks is very handy when it come to checking the mix, By simply opening up a pro mix and listening to that for a minute, we can quickly regain perspective on what does sound good and how the mix is represented on our system.
A: In my experience. listen at lower volumes does help immensely. When we turn up audio our ears over emphasize the high and low frequencies, somewhat resembling what stereos do to make your music sound “better” and more “exciting.” That being said, it can be very misleading if you only mix at loud volumes. You think your mix is sound so good, but when it’s played back at a moderate to quiet volume everything falls apart. The solution is mix a much quieter volume. Of course, it’s always good to play back your mixes at a few different volume levels to gain perspective (because remember, you can’t trust your ears), but in general keep it low when you mix.
Q: Psycho-acoustic are real?
A: Yes. The Psycho-acoustic, sound perception is real, this is how humans perceive various of sounds. The human ear can nominally hear sounds in the range 20 Hz (0.02 kHz) to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz), this is our limits of perception. The upper limit tends to decrease with age; most adults are unable to hear above 16 kHz. The lowest frequency that has been identified as a musical tone is 12 Hz under ideal laboratory conditions. Tones between 4 and 16 Hz can be perceived via the body's
sense of touch.
Conclusions (If you read all of this, Please don't take everything too serious)
This is why professional studios are designed by acousticians, treated with specialised materials, and use high-end monitors and visual analysis tools.
My advice.
Trust your ears, but only up to a point. Rest them, use reference tracks, check your mixdowns on as many reproduction systems as possible, and grab your trustworthy spectral analyser to keep an eye on those hard to monitor bass tones and rogue ringing frequencies.
If you don't have one, take a look here:
My recommendation Plugins for Audio Production
