Thomas Juth shares a simple habit that exposes weak vocal balance fast: check your mix at low volume, not loud. Cranked up, almost any mix sounds exciting and a buried vocal can hide in the excitement.
The reason it works comes down to how our ears respond at low volume. Thanks to the Fletcher-Munson curve, quiet listening makes your ears far less sensitive to low and high frequencies, so the low end and air both fade into the background and your attention naturally shifts to the midrange, exactly where vocal intelligibility and translation live. If the vocal disappears at low level, it's sitting too low, so treat quiet listening as a standard checkpoint for a mix that actually translates.