Every person you meet is listening through a set of headphones you cannot see.

Before you read, tune in.

This issue lives in Signal - not what you transmit, but what happens to it once it leaves you and lands inside someone else’s environment.

There’s a track for it. Listen →

Press play. Let it set the room. Then read.

(No rush. The words will wait.)

There's a cafe I go to often. I love the place. Great coffee, good food, warm people. But that's not the only reason I keep going back.

It's where I do some of my best listening.

When I produce an album, one of the most important parts of the process starts after I think the music is finished. I listen to it everywhere. In the studio. In the car. Through AirPods, through noise-canceling headphones, through a cheap Bluetooth speaker. Walking. Sitting in a crowded cafe with three different conversations happening within arm's reach.

Because I can control what I produce. I cannot control where you receive it. Those are two very different things.

The same song can sound incredible on studio monitors and completely different in a car. The bass changes. The space changes. Certain frequencies disappear, others suddenly dominate. Something I buried in the mix on purpose becomes obvious. Something I loved in the studio gets swallowed whole by the room.

Same song. Same recording. Same signal. Different environment.

And somewhere along the way, I realized people work exactly the same way.

We spend enormous amounts of time perfecting our signal - what we say, how we look, what we create, how hard we work, and how much we give. Then we send it into the world and assume everyone hears what we intended.

They don't.

Because nobody receives you in a studio. They receive you through their own environment. Their childhood, their fears, their relationship with money, their relationship with love, their relationship with themselves, whatever they happen to be carrying that day. You might be transmitting at exactly the frequency you intended, and they still might hear something else entirely.

That doesn't necessarily mean your signal is wrong. It might mean you're hearing an environmental variable, not a flaw in the recording.

This is one of the harder things I've had to learn. For most of my life, when someone misunderstood me, I started remixing myself on the spot. Maybe I needed to explain it differently. Soften it. Make them more comfortable. Say less. Give more. Be less ambitious, less emotional, less intense.

Less me.

I kept adjusting the source because I assumed every distortion happened at transmission. But sometimes the distortion happens at reception. That distinction matters more than I understood for a long time.

Because if you spend your whole life adjusting yourself for every environment you walk into, eventually you forget what the original recording sounded like. You optimize yourself for everyone else's speakers, and you lose your own signal in the process.

There's another side to this, though. As a producer, I can't just say the mix sounded good in my studio so everyone else is wrong. That would be ridiculous. The environment still matters. If the bass disappears on every Bluetooth speaker I test it on, I probably have a mix problem. If the vocal turns harsh through AirPods, I should pay attention. If something consistently fails to translate across environments, that's information, not an excuse to ignore.

Not every criticism means you need to change. But not every criticism is distortion, either. The work is learning the difference.

Is this feedback about my signal? Or is this feedback about their environment?

That one question alone can save you years of unnecessary self-editing.

You should test your signal. You should listen. You should care about how you land with people. But you cannot master yourself for every speaker on earth. Some rooms are noisy. Some systems exaggerate certain frequencies. Some people are listening through years of pain, or listening for something you never actually said, or can't hear certain frequencies at all.

None of that means you should stop transmitting. It means learning what you're actually transmitting in the first place.

That's why I love listening here. There's noise in this place - the grinder, three conversations at once, plates hitting tables, the door opening every few minutes, life happening on every side of me. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I put my headphones on and listen.

Nobody around me knows what's happening inside them. They don't know the world I'm hearing, the detail I just noticed, what I'm building, what I'm feeling.

And I don't know what's happening inside theirs, either.

Maybe that's worth remembering. Every person you meet is listening through a set of headphones you can't see. Their environment is shaping what gets through.

So is yours.

Know your signal. Test it in different rooms. Listen carefully when something genuinely doesn't translate, and adjust when the feedback is real.

But don't spend your life remixing yourself because one person's speakers couldn't reproduce your frequency.

Nobody knows what's happening in your headphones.

And you don't know what's happening in theirs.

The reading is done. Let it settle.

Listen again, and notice what environment you’re hearing it in right now.

Listen →

Stay as long as you want. This is the part most people skip.

Is this feedback about your signal, or about their environment?

- Raymond