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So I used to play Top Gear to death as a kid, and its composer Barry Leitch used heavy arpeggio and really influenced my own style, when I think about it. I was in the mood this time for some overcompressed dance music and this particular theme from the first track of the game (or each four-race country cup in the game) happened to be stuck in my head. Mostly I left the original tune intact, except for some artistic license here and there; I added harmony when there wasn't before, a little pitch bend at times as an accent, kind of embellished on the original percussion track, and I tried to make the bass synth sound like a car engine in a few spots. I did fire up my old cart and play it for a little while. Top Gear was pretty much just a rehash of the Lotus series from the Amiga and Genesis, I think. It was a decent racing game for its time, but Top Gear 2 and especially Top Gear 3000 were better games, and I feel are both severely overlooked. Honestly I've spent many, many hours on this already, and it's pretty much done, but I could use some feedback regarding production (I have some minor hearing damage that makes production notably more difficult.) Link Original track on YouTube

My first impression: hot DANG, this is well done! You pull off the olde timey piano sound nicely, the arrangements hit me with nostalgia, and the narrative approach would work even without the movie. Excellent work, I would love to see this as part of the OCR repertoire!

He already clarified. It was an original piece, not a VGM arrangement.

It starts with soothing strings along with a chiptune-ish lead, then morphs into something that makes me think of a concerto between the great fairy's theme and the violin (or at least it sounds like one) dancing around while throwing in parts of Zelda's lullaby. And it sounds great! Simple it may be, but I think it is a triumph. I'd add this to my OCR playlist without hesitation.

Since I'm around, preparing an update for the directors on our trailer, I can confirm eval is in process, and since it's mentioned in our video, we intend not to miss the anniversary milestone!

Yeah, an untreated room will be off, but there are basic "treatments" you can do via geometry and speaker placement that can make a dramatic difference. You don't have to cover your walls with insulation panels and have bass traps in your corners, as long as you place your speakers in a symmetrical position (avoid corners if you can) and have some sort of diffusion around+behind you (bookshelves or any other furniture that breaks up incoming sound waves into a relatively random/uneven dispersion pattern so you don't have too much flutter and reflections). Having accurate bass representation in a home studio will be impossible 99% of the time, and while a couch does help a little bit you'll still find yourself in the position to compensate in every mix, just be wary of the crossover frequencies between your sub and speakers. As PRYZM said, regardless of how flat a speaker is, your room will unflatten it, so follow some basic setup rules to get the most out of them: Have your speakers pointing down the length of the room if possible. (most important rule for home studios I think) Maintain an equilateral triangle between your ears and the speakers. Have them pointing at your ears and be the same distance from each other as one is to your head. Try not to have bare flat walls to your left or right (immediate location plus 1-2 feet behind you, wherever you approximate the sound from the speakers hitting the wall first) Don't have your back up against an immediate wall, the longer the space between your back then wall behind it, the better bass response you'll get. There are debates about what is the best way to set up speakers, but what there's no real debate about is that haphazardly placing your desk+speakers in any room is not the best idea, so try to follow as many setup guidelines as you can, even if you can only do one of those, it'll be a huge difference between having none. The Presonus Eris 3.5 in that graph are not flat in the least. There's a pretty large 8dB resonant peak at about 110hz and a large 9dB boost between 1khz-1.7khz, they're designed more for listening than mixing, so you'll have to watch your bass mixing and the very important 1khz area (between 1khz-2khz is where a lot of speakers of all price levels tend to vary a bit). If you want to test, load a simple sine wave patch and play B2, and then play a D4, you should hear a difference in level.

It doesn't matter what the graph of the speaker says because your room colors it beyond recognition. Also, I really doubt you can just hear what a flat response truly sounds like, especially if you're only testing it by listening to music where resonant peaks and standing waves may not even be present depending on the song you're playing. You measure this stuff, in real life, by using a sound pressure meter as you sweep up the range to detect deviations. The Sonarworks product will tell you the total response of your room + speakers at your listening position, and I guarantee you, especially because you remarked that your room is untreated, that your system is most certainly way off. Here was my system pre-calibration, in a completely untreated room: Those peaks are 9 dB. Would make mixing snares basically impossible, as when swapping tones I get a completely different thump to them depending how they're tuned. After calibration, the response has been flattened and the extra reflections from my walls were silenced so I could also perceive reverb mixing much better.