Dj -
There is no one answer here. Without hearing your music it’s impossible to be specific.
However - the most important link in the chain is your monitoring system and the acoustic treatment of your environment.
As an example - if when listening on mix-down you hear too much bass, your natural response will be to remove some bass. However, if it was you rspeakers or headphones that were providing the excess bass, then you would have incorrectly compensated in your mix by removing too much bass from it. On playback on another speaker system, the music will have too little bass because you would have removed it.
Hence you should strive for one or both of these:
- a flat monitoring system, generally provided by good near field monitors.
- a monitoring system whose sound you know.
The issue here is that, even with a flat monitoring system, your ear may not be perfect. For me, my right ear is not as good with high frequencies as my left ear, so I have to take that into consideration when I'm mixing, and the only way to do that is to learn over time by listening to lots of music on the speakers I know.
Anyway, for the long term - invest in the best near field monitoring system you can afford, and if using headphones, use the Sennheiser 600s or 650s or AKG equivalents. These will provide maximum possibility of your music sounding balanced, and of sounding the same on whatever subsequent sound system you play back on.
In the mean time, depending on how important these pieces are to you, you may consider paying an on-line mastering engineer a few hundred dollars to remaster one or more of the tracks. Alternatively, purchase Adobe Audition or Bias Peak; or else find some recommendations on how one of the major DAWS can be configured for mastering, and try to remaster them yourself.
The quickest approach to improving your mixes would be to bring them into the OASYS and use its multiband compressor and eqs to do some tweaking - on your new amp system (if it’s a high quality amp?).
I would also recommend that you purchase a copy of Bob Katz's book Mastering Audio - The Art and the Science. It’s an excellent book around on mastering. You can preview it on google books.:
http://books.google.com/books?id=EBCmpw ... kyOkLnEFVU
Finally, in terms of 'cleanliness' of CDs, OASYS CD burning is absolutely impeccable - absolutely spotless - no noise whatsoever. Given its all digital path and wireless environment, OASYS CD burning is one of its strongest suits.
Kevin.
