Set up along the longest wall in the room. Have at least 40cm of air behind the speakers. Unless they are suitable for soffit mounting like my Tannoys.
I use a huge thick throw, tacked to the wall behind as dampening. With all walls covered similarly.
With a carpeted floor, you won’t need bass-traps so much if you have the walls covered.
It’s good enough, unless mastering for a living.
With speakers like yours, you should be aiming at mixing flat, so it translates to all other mediums. To do that, you have to train the ears to listen flat. An hour in nature every day is a good start. I don’t mean a naturist camp. Sit in the woods and just listen. If any strange men come up to you, rubbing their groins - just tell them you’re busy working!
So long as you can hear the bass notes, then that is enough - although I suspect you might be throwing the kitchen sink at that bottom-end.
As you can see, I don’t sit directly in front of my speakers. I do however, sit in the perfect sweet-spot.
For mixing, I do that on my iPad, around the house, with remote software apps - whilst the main DAW is visually on my big monitor.
All pics are before I tacked up my throws etc.
I also have a huge golfing umbrella above me, with bits of foam on it - and I close the curtains for mixing.
Not squeaky professional, but my experience and ears take me a long way.
I seldom EQ anything before I get to the stage where I am concentrating on image depth and space.
Then EQ, compression, and reverb are my ‘proximity’ tools, more than correction devices. And all my sounds to this point are as untouched and natural as they can be.
My experience allows me to track well, and I aim purely for dynamic-range and detail.
Btw. Headphones are purely isolation devices for tracking to prevent overspill of monitor mixes to mics - nothing else.
Don’t be told otherwise.
A pair of 400ohm DT100’s gets the job done.
Any thoughts of mixing your masterpiece on Sennheiser HD600’s with correction software and psycho-acoustic apps emulating famous studios - all that is just spurious expense and good for nothing else except some retail gratification for 10 minutes. A distraction from the real quest - which is to train the expectations of your own ears.
Hence the woods. Birds, animals, leaves rustling in the wind, running water - none of it has EQ on it, or a personal PA system with their own custom response curve. It just is what it is - vibrant, alive, and REAL.
Then you get home, and if your arse is still intact, you can aspire to a soundscape of equal bristling excitement, where everything co-exists, and everything has relevance in that aural image you create.
