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so i have a set of nearfield monitors that i usually listen to radio shows and studio mixes on as well as try to make tunes... my question is...

when i listen to other people music, although the sub isnt what it would be in a club, it still has a certain amount of presence or weight to it...
now when i'm working on my own tracks, the sub has some presence to it... but it is much lower than that of other peoples... however when i simply turn the fader up on the subs channel, my speakers distort.

how come the good subs have presence and weight but dont distort my speakers? any suggestions?

sounds like a phasing issue...sub bass should always be mono too...

try dropping your track, and your track with the desired sub in it, into your sequencer. then open up a spectrum analyzer on each track and compare where the bass is most present in yours compared to the other track. then eq again, and again , and again (if your like me)

also make sure mono sub, and make sure none of your other sounds have any sub presence that will conflict your sub.

you can create presence with more eqing, compression , loads of factors come into it, but the above two should help alot

their subs might be compressed a bit, or EQ'd precisely to avoid overloading the speakers.

Are you rolling off your low lows?

two oh one wrote:Are you rolling off your low lows?

low lows? on the sub track, or everything else? what are you defining as low lows? i am rolling off the lows on most other tracks around 100

i played with compression a bit, and that definitely helped... any tips on EQing... i mean, if i'm using a sine wave and its not moving a whole lot... how do you eq it?

ok first of all make sure no frequencies are clashing with your sub - noch out the main frequency of your sub in you kick

Secondly it's possible (this is just my opinion and may not be truth) that some time exciters are used in the mastering process so there sounds like there is more bass on smaller speakers - you have inferred fundamental frequencies to give an impression of extended bass response - plug ins like waves Maxbass (be careful this is not a quick fix and could drown your mix) do this.

you need to Hi pass your sub to give yourself a bit more headroom - what's the poitn in having frequencies you can't hear taking up a load of headroom?

What are you listening to? MP3s? What kinda bit rate are they at?

I sometimes notice that my MP3's seem to have more presence, even if the sound quality is lower, i guessed it was because my speakers were having to do less work with certain frequencies being lost in the MP3 conversion process.

forensix (mcr) wrote:
Secondly it's possible (this is just my opinion and may not be truth) that some time exciters are used in the mastering process so there sounds like there is more bass on smaller speakers - you have inferred fundamental frequencies to give an impression of extended bass response - plug ins like waves Maxbass (be careful this is not a quick fix and could drown your mix) do this.

hmm i wonder how often those are used...

never put a high pass on the sub either... i'll give that a shot
thanks

you may just have a problem with the overall volume of each separate track in your tune.
Try lowering every part to as low as -6 db per channel, and start from there. push up the sub channel a bit to desired weight and volume. now export and normalize/compress.

The issue is that you may be wasting too much headroom by letting every channel almost touch -1/0 db, which leaves little room for the rest of your sounds, and thus, these sounds will sound distorted.
give it a try.

NoSpin wrote: hmm i wonder how often those are used...

never put a high pass on the sub either... i'll give that a shot
thanks

to be fair 80% of people don't have stereo systems that go much lower than say 60Hz (i base this on the number of idiots who still use the standard ipod headphones) so i reckon they must be used a fair bit