First you need a microphone that's actually reasonably flat at least out to the limits of what your speakers can do, or at least one that's been analyzed and has a compensation curve available.
Then you remember that (as the others above have been hinting), a simple EQ can't do anything about ringing and decay times. You can turn down a given frequency so that it's resonance isn't so much louder than other freqs, but it'll still last longer for a given impulse - very much like frequency specific reverb. More sophisticated software does...something...to help with that I think, but of course the right answer is proper acoustic treatment.
If you could trust the room itself, and had a flat mic, then you could compensate for your speaker's inherent response curve. Whether or not that's worth it is another question. Now pending more info about the mic and the room, I'm willing to bet that when you got it to "flat" it wasn't actually anywhere near flat AND it was smeared from ringing at certain frequencies AND if you got real deep into with ReaEQ you were also smearing relative phase all over the place. But even if you have got a good room and mic and did get the speakers good and flat, we're just not used to hearing things that way. So I'm not the least bit surprised that it wasn't particularly pleasant.
If you haven't treated your room (and it's not like huge so that it doesn't matter at the mix position) then you should try and get that done. Then, you'll be much better served actually just learning your monitors. Listen to everything through them as often as possible. I am lucky enough that my mix room is also the living room, and my monitors are also my "entertainment system", so about everything I listen to at home is through that system...
...except there's an area of overlap between my main monitors and my subs. I can't adjust the crossover point on either set of speakers. On my studio machine, I have a ReaEQ in monitor FX to compensate, but when I flip over to the "living room" machine, I don't have that, so everything I listen to there is a little fuller in the bass region. It makes the booms on the Netflix movies that little bit more dramatic and gives music a little bit more oomph and is just a little bit more like a typical hyped playback system. But I know that's there, and I know where I'm at when I'm mixing.
|