Stereo mixing to minimize artifacts when played on home theater?

[georgeludwig]

I've noticed that with many of my mixes, playing them back on a home theatre is various shades of weird. The worst artifacts I've experienced are a combination of buried lead vocals, along with inappropriately loud ambient effects (reverbs and echo off the lead vocal) coming through the surround speakers. A piano also had way accentuated low mids, which made the piano part overbearing, whereas in the stereo mix it was just barely present.

The words that come to mind are "stunningly out of whack". This is on a friend's system (don't know the model). When I asked him if it was calibrated, he said it did come with a reference mic that he used to calibrate it. He's not an audio nerd, so maybe he did it wrong.

I had been referencing mixes via Steven Slate Audio's VSX, and although my mixes now translate much better across stereo systems, home theater playback still sucks. There's no home theater emulation in VSX, so I've set up an aux send to my Dolby Atmos 5.1.2 soundbar for realtime monitoring. Although it exhibits some of the tendencies of my friend's system, it's not NEARLY as bad. Possibly because I don't have actual surround speakers...it's emulated via the soundbar.

So my question is: what else can I do to minimize the difference between the two playback experiences? Am I correct in assuming that out-of-phase content in a stereo mix gets routed through surround speakers in a home theater? If so, I could monitor anti-phase with Waves PAZ analyzer and try to minimize it. But is it even worth it, i.e. should I just ignore the issue?

[digitaldrummer]

I think you first need to determine if it is just your mixes, or do all commercial releases also wound weird on your friend's system? If it's only your mixes, then focus there. If it's the system, then try other systems. If one out of 100 playback systems, or even 1 of 10 sound bad, there might be nothing you can do to make it sound better. If you can disable whatever surround processing is going on by your friend's system, that may be worth looking into.

If it is your mixes only, then look at your own processing. I have VSX too and it's not perfect, but it can help you with certain things if you understand what you are listening for. I still go back to my monitors once I've used VSX. What do your mixes sound like in mono? If you don't have a way to listen in mono, then find a plugin that will do it for you (there are many out there). If you are using stereo widening plugins or exciters, etc. they can do some pretty weird things to a mix when overused. try disabling them or reducing the effect.

How are you playing it back on your friends system? If it is a lossless format, like mp3, that can sometimes do weird things. If you are connecting via Bluetooth, just stop it right now! BT is lossy and personally I hate the sound of cheap BT converters as they can really mess up the sound. Try to playback via method that is completely lossless.

[drumsound]

I was thinking the same stuff as Mike. Listen to some other music on your friend's system and see what's happening.

Goot to see you, George!

[georgeludwig]

I think you first need to determine if it is just your mixes, or do all commercial releases also wound weird on your friend's system? If it's only your mixes, then focus there. If it's the system, then try other systems. If one out of 100 playback systems, or even 1 of 10 sound bad, there might be nothing you can do to make it sound better. If you can disable whatever surround processing is going on by your friend's system, that may be worth looking into.

That's a great point...I'll play back some material I'm very familiar with at his place next time.

If it is your mixes only, then look at your own processing. I have VSX too and it's not perfect, but it can help you with certain things if you understand what you are listening for. I still go back to my monitors once I've used VSX. What do your mixes sound like in mono? If you don't have a way to listen in mono, then find a plugin that will do it for you (there are many out there). If you are using stereo widening plugins or exciters, etc. they can do some pretty weird things to a mix when overused. try disabling them or reducing the effect.

The mixes sound fine in mono. I don't use (m)any widening plugins, although I do a thing or two with m/s processing. But nothing like that on the lead vocal, which seems to be the main victim. I know VSX is not a perfect emulation of anything, but it does provide a convenient and wide-ranging set of filters to monitor through, and I'm far less concerned about the emulation's accuracy than I am about the various filter's ability to surface problems in the mix.

How are you playing it back on your friends system? If it is a lossless format, like mp3, that can sometimes do weird things. If you are connecting via Bluetooth, just stop it right now! BT is lossy and personally I hate the sound of cheap BT converters as they can really mess up the sound. Try to playback via method that is completely lossless.

I'm chrome-casting it, so it's the home theatre's DA. But I am streaming it off of SoundCloud, and I don't have a SoundCloud Go+ account, so it's not a lossless codec. That said, I have a hard time believing that a lossy codec could cause the exact artifacts I'm hearing. But I could be wrong...I don't know enough about how home theatres decode stereo signals into an x.x.x format. But you make a good point, and I'll publish the material via my Plex server and play back through that for next time.

[georgeludwig]

I was thinking the same stuff as Mike. Listen to some other music on your friend's system and see what's happening.

Goot to see you, George!

Good to see you too, Tony!!

[The Scum]

Does the system have a "play stereo as stereo" option? Then it should be rendering your mix, as it was prepared.

If it's blowing up a stereo mix into more channels, I don't think there are any particular standards for how that would be done. There are a lot of flimsy tricks (phase trickery, MS decoding, adding reverb, etc) to try to extrapolate channels that aren't there to begin with. If it has a "showroom mode", it might be doing things to over-accentuate that the surrounds are working (sorta like TV's being shipped with default settings to be the brightest in the lineup at the store, but maybe not super detailed/hi rez).

Maybe a more fundamental check: Are all the speakers in correct polarity?

If you're making stereo mixes, make the best stereo mix you can. And even then, playback setup might circumvent ideal presentation - we all know someone with a stereo system, with one speaker in the kitchen, and the other in the living room.

If you want good surround playback, mix in a surround format.

[vvv]

If you want good surround playback, mix in a surround format.

+1

Also, I've told this story here before, and recently hadda use it with the band I'm mixing now, but some years ago I hadda drummer drive me crazy for a week that the kick was incorrect - come to find out he was listening on a cheap bookshelf stereo - one with a cassette player - with the loudness switch on.

You wanna listen offa someone else's set-up, be sure it is properly set-up.