Hey There, I just finished a mix session with a client. He's a creative guy, very into sound, but I found myself with a collaboration issue I really don't have an answer to. That is, I would hear stuff he just wouldn't. Maybe an eencie bit excess bass here, or the timing being slightly off on something. Milliseconds. It all makes a difference that everyone feels but only someone trained in audio, or with a very particular ear, would notice. And that's stuff we have to approach in the mix, right? I mean, that's why we get hired - because we notice stuff most people don't. But when you're mixing, and the client's right there, and every minute is worth x dollars to them, and you're describing what you're doing but the client genuinely doesn't hear a difference, what do we do?
Mind you, I'm not talking here about a client who disagrees with the mixer. It's my firm position that, in those situations, the client is always right, because it's their project and they just know it better than you do. What I'm talking about is when the work is so subtle / nitty-gritty, or not even so subtle and nitty-gritty, but just subtle enough that the client can't hear it, or doesn't know how to hear it.
Do you take pains to make sure the client can hear the difference? Do you just move on and ignore it? Obviously, I really don't want to let the client get bored, because if they're bored they're less on their toes creatively. So spending huge amounts of time "fixing" something they don't identify as a "problem" is unappealing. But leaving it unfixed, or unoptimized, or just un-awesome isn't appealing either.
The nightmare situation at the extreme end of this challenge, I think, is when a client starts to suspect you're not really changing anything. Fortunately that hasn't happened to me, but I've heard stories.
So what do you do?