Hey guys so I'm not very used to mixing on monitors but I've been making more of an effort recently to use them instead of my headphones.

I have the monitors in the triangle position so that they're at a little bit of an angle.  One thing that I just recently noticed is that when I bring my ears closer to the computer screen the bass gets louder. With that being said... when I'm sitting down normally on my chair with a tiny bit of distance between myself and the monitors the bass gets softer.

Which one do I base my mixing decisions off of? Is this what people mean when they say that you need to "learn your monitors" or "learn your room"?

study room acoustics

Hey guys so I'm not very used to mixing on monitors but I've been making more of an effort recently to use them instead of my headphones.

I have the monitors in the triangle position so that they're at a little bit of an angle.  One thing that I just recently noticed is that when I bring my ears closer to the computer screen the bass gets louder. With that being said... when I'm sitting down normally on my chair with a tiny bit of distance between myself and the monitors the bass gets softer.

Which one do I base my mixing decisions off of? Is this what people mean when they say that you need to "learn your monitors" or "learn your room"?

Most likely you are facing a wall and your speakers back too. What you hear are the reflections coming back at you.

The only way to solve this problem is treating your room, if you don't have this option then, if you have, face a big window, so that the back of your speakers aim at it. Another option would be to listen on a quiet level and change the listening position.

Yeah. I have to admit my listening environment is relatively bad too. Though I've tried to sort of treat it, I still have this big resonance on 117 Hz.

Problem with this is the measurement. Without proper flat speaker and proper flat measuring microphone you rely solely on your ears.

A little trick I came up with though: Take a synth, make a patch that plays just a sine (may be also a bit of first harmonics so it's easily judgable) and make sure you have no volume modulation/envelope on. Make sure on your DAW meter that all the notes go up to the exactly same volume. Then play it note by note from bottom to the top and if any note sticks out as too loud, you've found a serious resonance you should try to get rid of or at least be aware of it. You can repeat this on another set of speakers to make sure it's a room problem.

...not a proper way of measuring at all, but beter than nothing.