Best Mixed Plans

The most aggravating part of mastering a song can be summed up thusly:

"Which sounds better? Mix A or (tweak tweak) Mix B? Mix A? Or Mix B?"

I find a final, mastered mix that I like, and almost settle on it, but in fixing one final thing I notice that something, technically, is incorrect. So I start fixing that, and in doing so the mix deteriorates into something that, although technically correct with no overloading or clipping, sounds crappy.

Tonight was one of those nights. All I needed to do was pull down the vocals, raise the bassline and call it done. But I noticed my final EQ plugin was getting overloaded on its input, and although I can't hear any clipping or buzzing, it's the knowledge that somewhere there's something incorrect. My solution was to add a limiter before the EQ, and that made it all worse. Booooo.

My guess is that Sonar and its plugins can handle a higher overload level without digital clipping. Maybe the internal processing has a high bit depth to allow more overhead. Dunno. Should probably research that.

At any rate, the A-B-A-B-A-B comparisons are fatiguing my ears. That's what sucks most about the final mixdown. The highs are the first to go, and then the upper midrange "air", and then my ears continue to close down into a hum. Bleh.

I suspect that I should either stick with last night's mix, or restart with that mix and do nothing but lower the vocals and warm up the bassline. And then maybe I can call it done? Hmm.