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My girlfriend and I met at a Swell Season concert.  Many of you might know them as “that band in the movie Once” that won an Academy Award for Best Original Song from a Motion Picture, but they are in fact a real couple with a real band making real music.

Our anniversary came up on Tuesday (she’s put up with me for a whole year now) and we were taking a trip down memory lane.  Being sentimental types, we kept trying to find ways to incorporate the Swell Season into the evening but couldn’t quite come up with anything exciting beyond listening to the record (which we didn’t end up doing anyway).

The band is great live.  Glen Hansard is a bit chatty on stage, but it is an engrossing couple hours of storytelling (and they’ll start touring in November so get tickets if you can).  But the film is fantastic if you’ve never seen it.  It probably has the best making-a-record sequence committed to film.

The only thing that bugged me about that act in the movie was after they finished recording, the engineer turns to the group and says “Well, let’s give it the car listen” and they proceed into a very scenic montage of the group piling into a car and driving around Dublin listening to the record.

The idea is that no matter what, a professional CD should sound good in the car.  It doesn’t matter who mixed it or produced it or what kind of car you drive, you should NEVER put a commercial album into your car stereo and say this doesn’t sound right.

In practice this is totally false.  In fact there are a number of CDs that sound absolutely horrendous in the car—The Who’s 2006 release Endless Wire comes to mind (which is a shame because Pete Townsend takes the time to outline every piece of vintage gear that they recorded and mixed with in the liner notes; proving once again it’s not what you have, it’s how you use it).  But still, the car listen is a pretty decent barometer in most cases.

Personally, I hate the car listen.  In the eyes of many pros, the car listen demonstrates that you aren’t familiar enough with your room and your gear to know when you are making the right decisions.  For most situations, you should be terrified if you are in the studio with a house engineer who says “Well, let’s give it a listen out in the car.”  That’s a bit like an architectural engineer saying “Well, I’m pretty sure the building is level, but we may want to give it another look around noontime when the light is better.”

Admittedly there are times when it might be necessary to use the car listen.  When you first come to a new studio, you might take a book of CDs into the new listening environment and play them in the control room to get used to the character of the space and the gear.  Then you might take your first mix out from the control room to the car, which is a portable, familiar listening space that has reasonable frequency range (as opposed to headphones), and test the mix out in order to make sure you properly assessed the room and made the right adjustments.

So what makes the car listen so appealing?  Well there are a number of factors that are present in automobile listening situations that you can’t test in the somewhat academic environment of a professional (or semi-professional) recording studio.

For one thing, everyone is familiar with what their car sounds like, so clients like to hear things in the car because they don’t have to actually go home to hear their music on a familiar loudspeaker system.  They can just walk out to the parking lot.  Of course if you go into the engineer’s car (like they did in Once) that is only for the benefit of the engineer.

Another benefit is that you get to hear what the record sounds like in noisy environments.  Studios are meant to be clinical, noiseless environments where you can hear minute details and imperfections.  They are ideal listening situations, but the real world is rarely ideal.  Most of the time consumers are going to listen over the hum of an engine going 60 miles per hour with the AC blaring and wind gusting against the windshield.

In those instances, you will lose most of your top end since environmental noise buries those frequencies very easily.  Also, bass reproduction suffers in the car because much of the energy goes out away from the car as well as inside it.  The thin material of the car doesn’t retain and resonate low frequencies the way it does mids and highs.

You can listen to the record in a real world situation and say “Well, Kanye usually gives me a bit more low end than this on the highway” and adjust accordingly.

Bear in mind that I’m saying a professional engineer who works at a particular studio consistently should never suggest a car listen, if you are patronizing a studio though, by all means take the record out to the car and give it a listen.  The engineer might even be grateful that you broached the subject so he doesn’t appear unprofessional. 

At the studio, you have to trust that the engineer is making the right decisions with your art, but it is never a mistake to check his work.