Got a friend (with some level of hearing loss due to years of gigging) who thinks his cymbals mix outta be louder. Customer is always right (sort of), but that said what do y'all have to say about what you hear when you leave the room to listen to your mix on your home speakers or another device - say a phone - to test for levels (upper mids and highs, in particular)?

- If I hear the voice and the snare only and barely any of the rest of the mix at low volumes or from another room, say, I am usually 'there' overall. Not sure if the crashes (particularly) should be in that consideration.

Thoughts?
Thanks guys!

 

Last edited: May 11, 2023

Sadly, not really. Firstly, the high freqs get additionally damped by a wall if you're in another room, secondly, what you're doing is basically listen to the track at very low volume (hearing threshold) and here comes the human perception into play. Have a look at this graph http://www.sengpielaudio.com/Acoustics226-2003.pdf (if someone has difficulties to read it, the lower a part of a curve is, the more sensitive we are to it).
At very low volume you hear best what's in the 3.5 - 3.8kHz range. So on one hand you're right, you should mostly hear vocs and snare, but you can't make any statement about the level balance of the rest of the frequencies. For this you'll need pretty high listening volume.