Mix to Mobile | Sound on Digital | RRP $39 USD
A lot of music producers preach perfectly tuned control rooms, carefully selected speakers that are wired up with premium cabling, all in the pursuit of the most perfect, flat and balanced sound. The point at which this pursuit falls apart is when a room isn’t perfect, yet here we are trusting our speakers, sometimes blindly.
It can take a lot of time to learn speakers and a room, and to learn them you’ll need to do a lot of listening; it’s incredibly important to know your system, and with this reasoning in mind, it can be incredibly helpful to check your mixes on a system that you use to listen to music more casually as well, for example your phone, Bluetooth headphones or speakers or your car for the fabled car test. Simple in theory, but routing signal from a DAW to Bluetooth speakers isn’t always easy, your DAW communicating primarily with your main audio interface/s, which usually don’t have Bluetooth enabled. While it’s simple enough to bounce a file down and check it on your headphones or in your car, there’s nought much more frustrating than hearing a glaring issue immediately: five minutes after bouncing, uploading to a cloud to listen, unlocking your car and turning it on. That’s where Mix to Mobile helped me, having spent an embarrassing amount of time exporting files only to spend mere seconds in my car before knowing what had to be done.
Catch up on all the latest music gear reviews here.
Mix to Mobile was shockingly easy to install, requiring installation as a ‘Sender’ plugin at my DAW end, and a ‘Receiver’ app on my phone, Mix to Mobile automatically scanning and connecting when putting the plugin on my master bus. There’s a handful of streaming quality options, and volume controls, but besides that, there’s not much to it; yet here it is saving me a whole lot of time.
Most recently I’ve discovered the file compression that happens when sending clients mixes, so your mix might actually be translating better than you realise; you mightn’t be hearing lossless files when checking the mix in the car or at home. With Mix to Mobile you’re hearing a lossless stream direct from your DAW!
Outside of music production I listen to a lot of music, and admittedly most of this is done on some pretty mid-tier Bluetooth headphones. I know how things are meant to sound on these more than I do my own treated mixing room, and find myself chasing my own tail listening on them, making changes in my mix room on monitors or wired headphones, before listening back on my Bluetooth headphones only to find I’d made things worse. Mix to Mobile had me mixing on these consumer Bluetooth headphones, earbuds mind you, also being able to toggled between and reference some of my favourite mixes from my phone as well.
While it would be incredible if we all had treated audiophile quality rooms at home, the reality of music listening is that a lot of the audience will listen on less than ideal systems. Our focus on the minutiae of our mixes seem in vain when someone sits off centre between a pair of speakers, on a tiny speaker that effectively sums our signal to mono, or worst of all: the tiny electrodynamic speakers usually featured on our smart phones. Evidence of this can be found in the 2023 Consumer Insights Global Survey, where it was found 75% of consumers responded that they listen to music or podcasts on the smartphones (Consumer Insights Global Survey, August 2023, USA, 8.641 respondents; 18-64 years).
Similar to the age old use of Auratones and NS10s, used to ensure mixes translate everywhere, Mix to Mobile allows you to quickly and easily check your mixes to make sure they don’t fall apart on any of these systems, Anywhere you phone or tablet can connect to, Mix to Mobile can be there. Check your mix on a home hi-fi system and walk around the room, or leave the room entirely and see how balanced (or unbalanced) it all feels. Best of all, there’s no need to bounce, export, print and upload anywhere as the Sender and Receiver plugin and app connect so easily.
Mix to Mobile also has a desktop Sender and Receiver app available, for example when checking a mix on someone else’s system, or vice versa. You can send your stream to someone else’s desktop, routed through their monitoring system and quickly make adjustments, or even mix from inside the car itself!
Mixing is the immediate use for this plugin, it is named after the job after all, yet the ability to stream high quality audio around opens up a world of possibilities. Got a band in making mix revisions? Streaming sound for an art installation? The possibilities are—for lack of a better word— lossless.
While a treated mix room is great, it’s not a reality for a lot of us, but what can be a reality is a system or pair of headphones we know really well to ensure things are sounding how we expect. You can also use Mix to Mobile to check on system that an artist might likely use, for example AirPods or a phone speaker, to ensure there’s no glaring issues before sending off files to a client.
Mix to Mobile have filled a gap for me, making me more confident in my work, having the ability to reference my own work easily, quickly and at a high quality.
For more info, or to buy the plugin to use on your next mix, check out Sound on Digital here.
