I would certainly NOT recommend mixing on PA speakers, but I've seen stranger things happen.
Do what works for you.

If you're careful, you can make it work somewhat, but be sure its only temporary. Pink Noise becomes your best friend in that situation. She should be your best friend in all situations, but you learn to have and to hold and to love and to cherish in sickness and in health until death do you part when you try to mix on large PA speakers.

Here's what I have seen done for studios that wish to mix nearfield and have large PA speakers in the control as well to play with a mix on...now I'm not saying this is the perfect solution but it will certainly help. Take your flattest-response condenser mic and put it at the listening position (where your ears would be) and generate pink noise through the EON's and capture it on the condenser mic. If you have a spectrum analyzer you can analyzer at what frequencies the speakers have boosts or cuts. If you have a 31 Band EQ you can place it before the in between your main outs and your speakers and essentially do the opposite of what you see in your spectrum analyzer. If the analyzer shows the speakers giving a -3db cut in the 150 hz range you would go to your 31 band EQ and give a 3db boost to flatten it out at 150 hz. Now like I said this does not by any means make the EON's as accurate as nearfield monitors or speakers specifically designed to be flat response speakers but it can help a ton so that you can "make do" with what you have.

The above idea kind of works.

Remember, pink noise (yes, your best friend sometimes) is random. Therefore, you may, at one point see a dip at 150, but a millisecond later, it's gone. Of course, the other problem is, by EQing your setup, especially with most common graphic equalizers, you are introducing phase and distortion into that portion of the bandwidth. This could really screw with your head as far as imaging and channel matching are concerned.

However, if you have to mix with the Eons, this method truly might be your only way to calibrate. Otherwise, I would strongly suggest that, if you don't like mixing in the near field, get a decent pair of hifi speakers and mix in the mid or far field. HiFi speakers are designed for the most part to portray music accurately. PA speakers are designed to portray music loudly. There, of course, is a big difference.

J.

Totally agree with the above post. The variables are great which is why I said it isn't gonna be a perfect fix but could make a definite improvement. Cucco makes an excellent point - PA speakers' frequency response will change greatly with how loud they are cranked or how soft they are pushed. Best bet would be to find a suitable listening level and stick with it, otherwise your calibrations would be off completely.

Thanks for the comments. I certainly do not want to go through any process of tuning my speakers so i can mix through through an accurate sound.
I guess my main problem is that near field monitors are too accurate. I would think I made a perfect mix for a song, to find out when I played it on other home stereos that I couldn't hear a snare and the bass was too loud. Other people I know go through this same process of trial and error.
Maybe I need to practice mixing on very accurate speakers.
But I found that when I hooked up a crappy stereo and mixed through that, my mixes were way better.
Have any of you had that problem as well?

I think you kind of answered your own question here when you said "Maybe I need to practice mixing on very accurate speakers". The bass thing is always a problem for first timers. They feel when they hear the mix on their speakers that there isn't enough bass. Well that's just being accustomed to hearing mixes on regular stereos that already "hype" the low end. On accurate nearfield speakers nothing should "jump out" at you and nothing should be hidden. Everything should be able to be heard almost equally so when you do transfer your mix to a crappy stereo the bass will be hyped like you are used to but not overbearing either. It just takes a couple times mixing on nearfields and getting to know how much bass in the nearfield's is gonna transfer to too much and so on. Make Cd's constantly of your mixes and try them out on your stereo until you get a feel for the "right" amount of bass and everything. I'm sure almost all of us had to do that in the very beginning.

Of course, that being said, you do have to make sure your monitors are relatively accurate. Several makes and models out there do just what rain's talking about and hype the bass and treble. So - if you mix it to sound "good" on your hyped monitors, it will sound flat and lifeless on regular stereos.

Some very accurate and linear monitors include:
Dynaudio - BM5, BM6, BM15
Event - SP8, SP6
M-audio - (don't recall the models, though they aren't near as accurate as the above, they're better than most budget monitors)

Monitors that are said to have "wierd" frequency anomolies:
Mackie 824's (I don't want to start a flame war here - I know some of you really love your mackies, this is just my infallible opinion. :wink: )
Behringer Truths
Yamaha NS10s

Good luck 8-)
J

Well I once tried that road of Event Studio Monitors and they burnt out, and I wasn't even turning them up that loud at all.
I took them to a speaker repair place and when they saw what speakers I had they said, "oh another one of these"
Turns out they get more Event Monitors in for repair than any other speaker maker. And a majority of them cannot be fixed at all.
So never will I buy Event again. Ill stick with what everyone is using and I know won't break, which I hear the Mackies are widely used I also see a lot of KRKs, and no doubt the NS-10s. I think no matter what, one will have to get used to how a monitor sounds for mixing. As I have discovered.

The M-Audio Bx8's are great. I feel they give just the right amount of bass during mixing that adequately transfers over normal stereos. Very good for the money IMO.

LuckyFeet wrote: Thanks for the comments. I certainly do not want to go through any process of tuning my speakers so i can mix through through an accurate sound.
I guess my main problem is that near field monitors are too accurate. I would think I made a perfect mix for a song, to find out when I played it on other home stereos that I couldn't hear a snare and the bass was too loud. Other people I know go through this same process of trial and error.
Maybe I need to practice mixing on very accurate speakers.
But I found that when I hooked up a crappy stereo and mixed through that, my mixes were way better.
Have any of you had that problem as well?

One word man..... ACOUSTICS!
If you had adequate and reasonably accurate monitors, and your mixes still didn't translate...... then it must be your listening environment!

Yeah I thought about that, but my listening room is pretty dead, and I had some cushioning under my monitors so the bass wouldn't rumble through the desk. And I wasn't listening to the mixes loud enough for a room to really mess up the sound in the first place. Unless I'm wrong about that.
I mean I would burn a CD of a mix, listen to it on a stereo and hear certain instruments or vocals that were too hot or quiet, and then after the fact I would be able to detect those too quiet or too hot parts in the monitors. Sometimes I would fix a mix and in the monitors it would sound wrong but good through a stereo. I just need to do a lot more mixing through monitors.