Referencing, Mid-side, Skill-load Balancing, and Stress-relief

How to get in the habit of referencing mixes using headphones or an entertainment speaker system before posting? I reference from time to time, maybe for a week, and then the habit falls by the wayside.
Mostly because wikiloops can be a simple stress reliever for me. That may mean cutting corners here
and there, wherein certain production options are decidedly not engaged in. Example: I may put as much I know into a certain track, while hardly touching other options on a simpler mix. Options include: distortion, multi-band, panning, limiting, special reverbs, and track effects including eq and compression. I almost always use a reverb and a catch-all quick mastering multi-compressor that I tweak, blending my overdub with the master template. The last bit of production that I've begun incorporating is mid/side processing.

First, back to referencing, studio monitors sound great, but can be insular compared to the boosting one finds to varying degrees in headphones and speaker systems. The multi-band doesn’t pop on studio monitors like it can on headphones and other speakers. How did I get into this topic? Well, I searched for tracks containing ‘concertinas’ and hit on a few backing tracks. An older track of mine, #210699, and a more refined piece,‘Sailing home’ - #244979, appeared. Listening to ‘Sailing Home’ on my laptop speaker system, my ears noticed the mid-side production on the cut in a very clear manner. The earlier effort of mine contained no mid-side work, and the ears tend to get pulled dead center, unpleasant for those desiring relaxation.

Thus, a revelation for me, as to how mid-side processing works hand-in-hand with referencing. Working towards finer sounding mixes, one can get caught into quite an effort. Certainly a rewarding challenge, but for me, something to work carefully into my routine - with a close eye on stress relieving aspects. Certainly, finding the balance between relaxation and work requires a good groove.

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"...studio monitors sound great, but can be insular compared to the boosting one finds to varying degrees in headphones and speaker systems. The multi-band doesn't pop on studio monitors like it can on headphones and other speakers. "

I like this sentence because I think it says a lot about Wikiloops. The question is, how does our target audience hear or how do we hear in Wikiloops?

Some of us also state in our tracks: it is best to listen with headphones. Unfortunately, there is no survey that confirms my opinion, but I am convinced that most of us listen with headphones.
If so, headphone mixing rules probably apply to most of us and we can say goodbye to generally applicable mixing and mastering rules or vice versa: wikiloops = music for headphones, at least in many cases.
Maybe a button "headphone mix <-> standard mix would be helpful?

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Headphones vs speakers. It's generally accepted that...
If it sounds good on speakers it will sound good on headphones.
If it sounds good on headphones it may or may not sound good on speakers.

Until recently I had Yamaha HS5 monitors and DT770 headphones.
The monitors have a well documented 1KHz bump. Also bass falls off as the speakers are small.
The headphones stab your ears with high mids. The low end loud but a blur.
They sounded very very different from each other which left me confused. Which is more correct? Which to trust?

Breakthrough.
Eq the bump out of the speakers.
New expensive Neumann NDH30 headphones.
Now the speakers and headphones sound very similar and I trust both or either. Now I can focus on details with the headphones and feel/balance etc with the speakers.

Amazing what difference trusting your monitoring makes. My mixes now translate onto anything with no effort. After 40 years of bad monitoring I feel a bit of an idiot. How many times do we read that it's all in the monitoring? Then we buy a guitar or something. Doh!

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Good point zedders, and congrats to your headphones (and monitors).

And it's true, many people underestimate this effect - if your headphones for instance have that high mids or presence peak, then people tend to "balance" that out with eq - and the effect is that other people with more neutral cans or speakers are missing sibilance (with singers for instance) later. So over"correcting" is a big thing IMO, which is why I recommend to at least use something like Sonarworks, or equalising out the curves of monitors or headphones in the monitoring bus with other tools (or using something like wavelet and autoeq on phones)... and *not* in the final mix.

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My approach is to use three types of loudspeaker to arrive at a final sound: Bose headphones; M-audio active PC speakers [with an Audiophile soundcard] and Cambridge Audio "living room" speakers. Each with their own audio colour (of course). It involves a bit of traisping around the house and work on the mixer but when I feel the mix sounds broadly acceptable on all of them then I'm done.
One thing with getting the "right" sound is not to mix for too long or else your brain - and especially your ears - gets fatigued and your perception of sound changes which can lead to unnecessary
and endless knob/slider twiddling.

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