Does this kick sound distorted to you?

The Lounge General Discussion
1

Here’s a 4 bar loop of a kick, the last 2 bars have an eq dip approx 220hz

When I listen on speakers, it sounds clean to me.

When I listen on headphones, the body has what sounds to me like harmonic distortion, reduced slightly with the eq dip.

I can’t tell if the sound is actually distorted and I just can’t hear it on my monitors for some reason, or if the sound isn’t distorted but just pushing headphones too much they are distorting.

I have tried multiple speakers and multiple sets of headphones.

Even when I listen at lower volumes on headphones I still hear distortion.

Could you take a listen on monitors and headphones and tell me what you hear?

2

yeah it sounds more clicky than distorted

3

Does this kick sound distorted?

No.

Not on my monitors or headphones.

Its probably your headphones.

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4

Sounds fine on my headphones, maybe a little ticky but not distorted.

5

Doesn’t sound distorted here, listening on a great monitoring setup that I completely trust.

6

I played it on my airpods max and the mid-range elemt of the was quite hyped and maybe distorted. But onky after I accidentally turned the volume up high (and then brought it down again). So I worry I broke my headphones.

On Airpods the kicks sounded fine, the midrange sounded intentional and “present” rather than “fuzzy”.

7

If you drag the sample into a DAW, you’ll see that it’s not clipping. The transcient is pretty sharp and it’s a very short kick, so on its own it doesn’t sound too pleasant at high volumes, but it should work well in a mix :+1:

8

Thanks everyone, really genuinely appreciate it, I was going a bit nuts over it.

9

I assume we are listening to the export of a DAW?

It’s saturated at least, there’s quite some harmonic content.

Also, the noise floor gets pushed down by the kick.
This could be caused by compression, though. Is there compression at work?

If you want to determine what does cause the saturation, a good start would be to evaluate where the noise floor comes from.

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10

It seemed to be coming from a limiter on the mix bus. I think part of it was both a bit of distortion from the limiter as well as the limiting raising the level making parts of it easier to hear. What was weird to me was how different it sounded through monitors vs headphones. My room has some treatment but still quite reverberant, maybe it was masking it or washing it out.

11

Headphones are like magnifying glasses :slight_smile:

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12

Yes as I am finding out!! I try to avoid them as I find they exacerbate my tinnitus.

I shoulda bounced the un-limited kick for comparison but ive been messing with it for ages and not sure I could get back to where it was.

In the end I felt like if I didn’t like how it sounded in headphones I needed to change something so backed off the limiting.

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13

On AirPods Pro 2 sounds ok.

14

A reverberant room isn’t that bad. For example, the reverb smears the transients and it’s like a magnifying glass of the colour of the transients :wink: (One could say, Headphones are magnifying horizontally, Speakers in a room [or a room] magnifies vertically.)

I recommend mixing and working with speakers as much as possible, and use headphones to check for errors :wink: Just in this case, you discovered the problem with the limiter thanks to the headphones.

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15

„does this kick sound distorted to you?“ reminds me of „ist diese bassdrum korrekt?“

16

OP reminds me of another favorite question of mine, which is “ Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?”

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17

This is next level brain food. Thanks!

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