Mixing with Computer Speakers

If you have purchased computer speakers for your college dorm and you plan on using them for dorm room recording monitoring and mixing, you should know that many of these types of speakers will give you inaccurate responses of sound. Especially if you have computer speakers with a subwoofer, the results you hear are going to be inconsistent with other systems. Even small differences in the placement of your subwoofer can change what you hear in the bass levels completely.

In recording studios speakers without subwoofers are usually used for regular music recordings. This ensures the most accurate complete frequency range, and does not have an area where the frequencies switch from the speakers to the subwoofer. If you are using a computer speaker system for mixing and dorm room recording, there are a few things you should try to make sure it doesn't ruin your music.

You can try mixing in headphones. This is not usually a good idea in recording situations but some nice headphones can give you an accurate response where computer speakers might not. This is also ideal for recording in a college dorm because mixing on headphones will not make any noise for roommates, and if your dorm room is not well soundproofed or treated acoustically the headphones will take that out of the equation.

Also make sure that you check anything that you have mixed or mastered on computer speakers on a different audio system that you are used to, such as your car. This will show you how your stuff sounds compared to the commercial music that you usually listen to in there. Conversely, you should listen to commercial music on your computer speakers so you know what they do to the sound of songs that you know.

This should help you if you need to mix and record with computer speakers, which might be the case in a college dorm.

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