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.

[Mad Genius Audio]

Is that so? What sample rate did you record at?

[Naagzh]

Does the weird guitar thing happen when you bounce down to an uncompressed, stereo 16/44.1 file, or just when you bounce to an mp3?

If it doesn't get weird as an uncompressed file, then you could try using Toast or iTunes to do the mp3 conversion, which would let you know if the "bounce to mp3" option really is the culprit.

I've done that same guitar trick with no weird side effects after bouncing, though I usually make one side's tone a bit different than the other (using Sansamp), as well as delaying it by 16 msec or so.

[Mad Genius Audio]

You talking about an uncompressed 16/44.1 WAV? In that case, no, but I have bounced other songs to MP3 and they sound just fine.

[Mad Genius Audio]

It was indeed mixing down using MP3. I mixed a small snip in WAV, and it sounds beautiful. Perhaps it was the way I recorded something, because again, I've always bounced to MP3 and it always sounded just fine. I don't know. That will be something to experiment with. Thanks for the help everyone.

MGR