Here’s a ballsy statement that I’m sure we’ve all had at one point or other:

If people don’t listen to music in super well treated rooms with fully optimized speaker setups, then why mix in a treated room in the first place?

Doesn’t it make more sense to mix in an environment that sounds as close as possible to the target environment with reflections, reverb and all?

Somehow it seems logical.

Surely that will lead to mixes that translate much more naturally, right?

Of course playback environments vary massively, from cars to headphones to living room hifis and big PA systems etc.

With that in mind, is mix translation even a real world thing?

I definitely used to wonder about this myself. It always felt like a conundrum somehow.

But with enough mixes under my belt I realized there’s a fundamental misunderstanding in these assumptions. 

If you really want to get mix translation right you need to make sure you understand what it is you are aiming for.

And then it totally makes sense why you’d want to treat the acoustics in your studio.