this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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Is it? Every producer is different, every studio has different equipment and most importantly, everyone's ears are different. You can't possibly know what they intended.
The truth is that the correct way to listen to music is however you like it to hear it!
It absolutely is not. Albums aren't mixed to be listened to on studio monitors, they are mixed to sound good on consumer grade speakers because that's where people listen to music. Nowadays if you're listening on air pods that's probably the way it was meant to be listened to.
Yeah, not to mention the loudness war changing how things were mixed.
And like with most art, the artist doesn't get a say in how you appreciate it
Fuck the loudness war
WHAT DID YOU SAY????? SPEAK LOUDER
No, the reason why it sounds good on consumer grade equipment is exactly because it was mixed on flat response studio monitors. Flat response means little to no bias across the frequency spectrum and no enhancements.
Yes, I am aware that studio monitors (other than NS10Ms, lol) have a flat response and that albums are mixed primarily on studio monitors. But the people mixing those albums aren't mixing them to be listened to on studio monitors. There using their extensive knowledge to make that album sound its best how most people will be listening to it. Taking into account people listening in their car, on their phones, on their laptop speakers, headphones, air pods, home stereos, fucking TVs, etc.
No engineer worth their salt will be mixing an album to be listened to on studio monitors because that's not how normal people listen to music.
Edited to add: However, the point I kind of lost is people should listen however they want. I used to listen to albums that I knew very well on my monitors to get to know the speakers.
From my limited understanding (and what I just read up right now), if you send audio through non-flat-response speakers multiple times (so stick a mic in front of the speaker to re-record it, and play it back through the speakers again) then each time your highs and lows would become more silent and the mids would become louder.
They're designed as the last piece in the chain, to then give some artistic coloring to the music.
Flat response is designed to not do that, so that what comes out sounds as much as possible like what you've put in.
In my personal experience as a very hobbyist musician, yes, of course I will also try to listen to my shit on phone speakers and try to make it not sound entirely terrible there. But you go from one consumer-grade speaker to the next and entirely different frequency ranges are fucked up.
Having some headphones that don't fuck with the sound (whether intentional or just crappy) is really helpful, because they give me a middleground that's likely to sound reasonable on multiple systems.
Much better than composing on a system that fucks it up in a specific way and then playing back on another system that fucks it up in a different way. That's pretty much guaranteed to sound terrible.
That's why flat monitors and sound dampening are important.
A lot of money is spent to try and make a neutral room.