Expensive music equipment lies to you

If you ever were somehow invested in learning how to produce music, and I have for almost 10 years, you’ve probably come across the term “monitoring” - monitoring speakers, monitoring headphones or such.

The point is you invest in some expensive monitoring listening equipment that will give you a very flat sound - meaning it’s not artificially enhanced, bass is not exaggerated, well, pretty much nothing exaggerated. Ideally the frequency response should look like a flat line.

So you buy the stuff to get an extremely sterile sound that none of your listeners will get for some magical benefits of - what exactly?

Let me reiterate - your listeners don’t have this gear.

Your average listener will either listen to your music on some cheap ass earbuds from some random cheap ass shop, or some cheap ass speakers that aren’t able to reproduce the low frequencies you so meticulously shape with your expensiveass™ monitoring gear.

I’ve had my studio headphones for probably more than 7 years and the first years I had them I was really terrible with telling how my music really sounds. People were often telling me that my music had too much bass and I had no idea what they were talking about - it sounded fine to me.

Only after listening to my own music on a multitude of playback devices I was able to truly understand how to shape frequencies so they translate. That was a convoluted bit of info for someone who has no idea about music production so in simpler terms: I learned how to make my music sound good everywhere after referencing it on a big variety of speakers.

You may think it’s normal to learn how your mixes translate to other speakers like this - well, it is, but by locking yourself in to some magic sterile speakers the learning curve is attenuated - you must learn to compensate how your gear sounds way more than on any other normal cheapass™ speaker.

I’ve “invested” in mid-high end monitoring speakers too. (And a subwoofer I could talk about for hours.) I can hear every mp3 artifact very clearly on them. Any hiss in music is so well defined I can quickly tone it down so it doesn’t deafen…

other producers.

Seriously, who are we doing this for if not for other producers to glaze our asses?

If no “end listener” will hear all this shit then who? Other hi-fi enthusiasts that are probably less than 1% your market?

Well, I think it kinda is that way after hanging out on SoundCloud for a long while. Music producers complimenting how clean and trendy their mixes are with no “real” listeners who don’t analyze what they hear, but just enjoy the music.

The conclusion today is probably: don’t buy this expensive stuff if you just want to make music?