Human Mistakes

[Pedaling Prince]

And on the other side of that token is [Pealing Prince] who is willing to overlook 100% cross-system translation to retain his perspective on the artists intentions, filtered by his own personal tastes... simple as that.

I was pretty sure you were talking about me here so I put my name into the quoteback from your post for the sake of clarity.

This is the only area in which I disagree with you. I do not "overlook 100% cross-system translation." I actually make a point of evaluating my mixes in four environments for this very purpose: on my speakers, on my headphones, on my iPhone with earbuds and on the iPhone's internal speaker. The idea here is to get an idea of the sound on audiophile systems (the speakers), high end portables (the headphones), low to midrange portables (the earbuds) and the ordinary craptastic mono system (the iPhone speaker).

The Metallurgist seems to be fixated on tailoring his recordings to preserve the relative balance in both stereo and mono across all listening platforms, even if this means compromising sound on high end systems. Myself, I do consider how my mix will sound on less capable systems and I am willing to make compromises if my mix has significant problems in one of my test environments (I've made adjustments to mixes because of things I've heard on the iPhone more than once). However, I don't expect the finer nuances of my mix to translate well to craptastic systems because... well, they are craptastic systems; they're not intended to reproduce subtle harmonics. So I expect my mixes to lose something in the translation when played in the average environment, but I'm not worried if the vocals seem a little louder or the guitar a little softer than on an ideal system so long as the spirit of my mix is still intact.

You're right about one thing, though. While I do consider and test for the performance of my mixes on more modest playback environments, I'm as dogged about refusing to compromise fidelity as Metallurgist is about refusing to compromise compatibility; when I do make an adjustment for compatibility it's usually only a balance adjustment and has little or no impact on the performance of the mix on high end systems.

In conclusion, I do consider cross-platform compatibility, but for the sake of making full use of the capabilities of the best gear I'm satisfied with about 80% compatibility. Which is why I refuse to compress the dynamic range of my recordings so they'll play "loud enough" on less powerful systems. It's been my experience that even recordings with dynamic range of 14 dB or greater will still play acceptably on the iPhone speaker; sure, you lose some of the quieter, more subtle parts of the mix but that's to be expected when playing on such a tiny speaker. So long as we can still hear the vocals and the passion of the singer and the music it's not really relevant if you can still hear that subtle synth pad or soft acoustic guitar.