Mixdown quality is horrible

[Mad Genius Audio]

Hey all. I've had this problem for a little while now. I have a longER song (6:22) and every time I bounce it down to disk, it loses quality...no matter what I do. I want to bounce it to an MP3, and everywhere I can see, I'm selecting the 16-bit bounce at 44.1 kHz, I'm throwing a dither on the master track at 16 bits, everything I can, but when it plays back (especially through the headphones) it sounds really watery. That's the best I can describe it...as if it went through a massive high-pass filter. Thing is, I will listen to the mix in PT through monitors and headphones, and it sounds great. I bounce it down, and it sounds horrible. Any thoughts? Thanks.

MGR

[Catdaddy]

Check your sample rate for the MP3, as well as the conversion quality. The faster conversion setting usually blows. Use the slowest setting.

[Mad Genius Audio]

I will give that a go. I'll let you know what happens. Thanks.

[Mad Genius Audio]

Well, that did not fix the problem. I even checked the "Convert during bounce" box, hoping that would help to some degree, but I have the exact same thing.

[Mad Genius Audio]

I'll tell you what...the more I listen to it through the headphones, it sounds like it's only the rhythm guitars doing it. Here's how I did it. I recorded on mono file with rhythm, then I copied that to a second track, and offset that one slightly off of the click, and then panned both to either side to give it that nice, full stereo sound. I'm going to go mess around right now, but could it be phase cancellation that could be giving it that horrible sound?

[Kryst]

Haha, I remember doing that with samples. It was years ago, and sounded great in Pro Tools, but came out bland and almost completely centered. If I were you, I'd try a better way to layer. Redo the track again, keeping the original one. That way you have 2 slightly different sounds from the same instrument to pan. It gives a bit more...contrast, I suppose.