I hear this type o stuff too… but then again, its funny how commercially mastered music always seems to work in most rooms? As in, maybe its not so much about optimizing everything to a rooms acoustic properties and just boils down to… having a v good mix balance and sane frequency spectrum?
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i really appreciated some earlier advice i think it was on this thread, essentially saying make sure the bassdrums and the bass parts have a lot of bass to them (in a sensible fashion without going overboard) … and make sure there isn’t too much bass in the other parts so as not to conflict when going through a large sound system.
Also interestingly, as Bananas mentioned, they had to then remove a lot of Mids when playing live, and most likely i will have to do the same when eventually taking it to the stage. 
if i were to play with anything besides an Octatrack in a performance scenario, say a Machinedrum and Roland se02 … i would most likely route them both through a separate channel of the DJ desk for each instrument.
For that essential individual channel 3 band EQ of the physical mixer.
Although that would then mean a workaround required to be able to sample the extra gear to the Octatrack realtime.
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I agree with you but unfortunately when one’s playing live you can’t use any hardcore mastering chains, though you’d need one for each song because each is arranged differently.
Actually one of the DJs played one of my tracks that I produced and mastered myself (with medium skill you can say), and it sounded pretty good and full on the system. I now think the ideal situation is to have a good PA , a nice mixer (with onboard compressors) and you can send your different channels and mix there, don’t forget that if your signal is coming from analog hardware the sound will be crispier than anything you can pull out of a soundcard playing at 48,000 khz… But that unfortunately is hard to depend on especially if you’re doing shows using lower quality equipment.
It was funny, one of the guys here recommended that I play it using 96,000khz, which I did, but during the show the soundcard started stuttering and I had to revert back to 48,000, though it never did this when I practiced at home, lol.
the best DJ’s are actually quite often adjusting the EQ on the various tracks they have playing. not continually as the song plays, but they make sure the tune is tweaked right for the moment, the audience, and the surroundings.
There is absolutely no point to playing a final mix out at 96kHz. It won’t sound any different than 48kHz, it just makes your computer work harder for no reason.
If, by some chance, you have an audio interface that will actually output frequencies higher than 20kHz when output sampling at 96kHz(1), then you risk significant sound distortion at the speakers (since they are not designed to reproduce signals above 20kHz and often respond poorly and non-linearly above that).
- This means that the DAC would change its re-sampling filter (which is always analog) to be above 20kHz - thus allowing frequencies you can’t hear into the signal.
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Thanks for pointing that out 
I’m comfortable now that I feel I’m not missing out on anything.
it’s moderately hilarious that a fellow performer would suggest the idea of setting the soundcard to be 96,000hz. Most likely friendly intentions but really it’s a sabotage to encourage the trying-out of a setting in a live performance scenario.
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Some great suggestions here, some not so.
I imagine its been said already but I’ve admittedly not read every reply on this thread 
My question would be how many systems have you tested your tracks on?
If it’s more than 4-5 does the sound sound stale on all of them?
If yes then you can eliminate outside factors like dodgy soundsystems and just concentrate on fixing your mixes.
My hunch is that maybe you need to get used to your monitors a little better, you do that by A-B testing your mixes on different speakers and understanding how what you hear from your monitors will actually sound like on a big system or off a car stereo, the more you do that the better you will know your monitors/room and the better sounding your mixes will be.
No amount of compression, EQ and limiting will fix a fundamentally “bad” mix, so I would first look at your levels, you can do a lot by just having your track levels right.
Simple advice, I’m not going to go into technicals, it’s been said already on here but I think the two points I made will help a lot. 1) Get used to your Monitors 2) Getting your track levels right on the outset will save you a lot of faffing.
Great technique is to use Pink noise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b3DtQALtuY
Good luck
I’ve never played electronic music live but if I were to perform live the type of music I do nowadays (techno), I’d be really concerned about this. How do you mix and tune your sub bass sounds for the PA system in the room beforehand, especially if you do not have time to do a proper soundcheck?
I find this thread interesting as well.
One thing I learned from DJing with stems is that in my preparation I neglected the low end and then in order to get more umpf in the chest I had to cut the highs on the DJ mixer to make most of the low end. This is probably my main problem - preparing the low end.
Thanks for the tips here, this is a topic I am always happy to learn more about.
I said this before but usually I find over the PA system, that because Fletcher-Munson flattens out somewhat at very high SPLs (more so for the sub bass), I put a first-order (12dB/octave rolloff) highpass centered around 40hz. This may leave some readers aghast, but I am not a fan of overpowering bass. I find it can hide other melodic elements and textural elements due to forward masking.
This tends to sound good a wide variety of volumes, and doesn’t blow away the listeners with subbass at a club volume of 95-100 dB SPL.
I also tend to really de-emphasize 2.5-3khz (depending on how quiet I mixed it at, a 3-6dB negative peaking EQ with a Q of at least 2, on pretty much any mix.
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haha, I actually tried it while practicing my set 3 times (equal to 3 hours) at 96,000 and it didn’t do any latency noise, but in a live setting it did in the first minute haha. It was hot that day, and the laptop was on and placed on my soundcard, both of them heated up significantly, I think this was the reason.
Was easy to get over with tho, problem was solved in 10 seconds without even stopping the track, thankfully.
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I only played it on 1 system, the one at the party. The things that I figured were mixed well didn’t have highly noticable problems…
However there were some tracks that I did in the last few days before the show that I haven’t taken much time to mix them as properly because I simply haven’t heard them enough.
One thing I noticed was that they were sounding fine on my consumer-level speakers, but on my monitoring headphones, I later could see the problems that were especially in the mid region. and the ear-popping snares.
I agree with you, just having a good mix will fix all these problems, no need to overdo compression or limiting or all that jazz to counter mixing problems.
The pink noise thing is really nice! watched the entire thing. I never knew about this before, will surely try it out.
@cameodemon Yes I already did the highpass on the bass already, especially for the analog four, since its bassy content usually depends on a filter on the low end with resonance turned way up, I was afraid that sometimes it would go crazy as I sometimes had perf-knob controls at frequencies and stuff, so I figured better to tone it down and avoid disasters, I also turned down the high end a little because it was too clear on the PA.
Cheers