Look at photos or videos from almost any top-tier recording studio and you will usually see the same setup: at least three very different pairs of monitors on the console or on stands. Huge wall-mounted mains, a classic nearfield pair, and a set of humble little cubes - Auratones or similar.
 
That raises an obvious question: if a studio has invested tens of thousands of dollars in perfect far-field monitoring and room acoustics, why does the engineer reach for the monitor controller every 15 minutes and switch to small speakers? Why keep jumping between playback systems at all?
 
The answer is simple: no monitoring system, no matter how expensive or advanced, can tell you the whole truth about a mix. Every system highlights something and masks something else.
Let us break down the classic studio workflow and see how it actually works.

These are about scale, energy, and sub-low information. This is where you check the foundation of the track: how the kick and bass interact at the very lowest frequencies. Mains give you that physical weight and density. And, of course, they are also there to impress the artist or producer.

Blind spot:
Because of the listening distance and the influence of a large room, microdynamics can easily get lost, and the midrange may feel smoother than it really is.

Your main workhorse. You sit in a tight equilateral triangle, with the room influence kept to a minimum. This is where you assemble the mix with the highest possible precision. This is where you build the stereo image, set reverb tails, dial in compression, and shape instrument attacks.

Blind spot:
Nearfields often create the impression that the low end is solid, even though in reality the monitors may be doing very little below 50 Hz. On top of that, two-way systems can introduce small phase shifts around the crossover point, right in the critical midrange.

The classic grot-box check. One driver, no crossover, no bass reflex port. No low end, no top end - just naked midrange. Why does that matter? Because this is where 90% of the song lives: vocal, snare, melody. Cubes mimic the way your track will translate to a phone, laptop, or Bluetooth speaker.

Blind spot:
Working on them for hours is physically uncomfortable, and it is easy to misjudge the balance of high-frequency and low-frequency instruments. But there is an important upside: switching to small, midrange-focused speakers at a low level is a great way to refresh your hearing during long sessions, giving your ears a break from aggressive highs and pumped-up lows.

The main problem with our hearing is its phenomenal ability to adapt. If you listen to a mix on the same monitors for more than 20 minutes, your brain gets used to it. Everything starts to feel fine, even if the vocal is 3 dB too low. Switching to another monitoring system instantly resets your perception. But for that reset to work for you rather than against you, two rules matter.

First, level matching

Our hearing is nonlinear, and the brain always interprets the louder signal as bassier, brighter, and more “correct.” If the mains hit you in the chest while the cubes are barely whispering, you will not get an objective comparison. The perceived loudness should feel the same when you switch.

Second, timing

Do not nervously flip between monitors every 30 seconds; it only breaks your focus. A healthy workflow looks like this: you spend about 80% of the time on your main nearfields. You switch to the cubes for 5-10 minutes to check the balance. You bring up the mains briefly to verify the sub-low range and judge the overall energy.

Imagine a classic situation: on the nearfields, the bass guitar grooves and feels solid. You switch to an Auratone-style emulation and the bass simply disappears. That is a clear sign that the part contains mostly sub energy, while the low-mid harmonics are not speaking at all. You add saturation, make the bass read clearly on the cubes, switch back to the nearfields - and the mix comes together.

The idea of constantly changing perspective has been built into Realphones from the very beginning. All it takes is the habit of regularly changing your monitoring perspective and allowing different monitor systems to reveal different aspects of your mix.
To make those comparisons meaningful, we carefully calibrated the levels of all monitor emulations. The perceived loudness remains consistent as you switch between systems, helping you make objective decisions without being misled by differences in volume.