So now that I am bringing down the loudness..

[Cubical]

After I read Malcolm's post about recording volumes and further checked out a few more sites concerning this problem, I have gone back and began to redo all my mixes and no surprise, they sound much better and show off a much better music pefformance, even with just small adjustments.Something though that I am having a hard time with now is mixing bass and kick drum. At the risk of looking REALLY stupid, I have been mixing my songs through a stereo BECAUSe they gave them a STRONGER feel, instead of doing it throgh proper acoustic headphones, so now I have hard time disceerning if I have put enough bass and kick drum into a mix, or if their EQ is on the right track? Does anyone have any guidelines to suggest how I can get a grip on this? Its my own fault really..

[jammy jamz]

i mix on pretty cheap stereo speakers, cubical, and, all i can say is listen to your mixes on as many sources as you can.

i find the hardest one to mix nice for, is a booming car stereo. so, if it sounds decent inside of the cockpit of the car, things are going in the right direction.

[Mathieu Benoit]

For me personally, I find that there are 2 components to a kick drum, the low end and the high end. No matter how much low end you stick on a kick drum it will loose presence without the snap of the beater. So focus on frequencies that will best accentuate that. Frequencies in the mid-high catagory would be a good place to start, anywhere from 2k-5k should have something useful. Find what's right in your situation and add some of that too, not just the low end.

As for the other thing, you could ideally mix on any kind of speakers so long as you understand how they translate to other setups. For example, if your listening environment is really bottom heavy your mixes will sound liek they are lacking in bottom end everywhere else. If you can recognize that and compensate for it, then it should still work. Typically though it's a lot less effort to simply balance out your listening environment.