Well, apart from some things you mentioned and other obvious ones (quality MP3, quality cables, check the tune in flat eq. and so on), a thing I do often is to use some tunes that sound perfect to me as a kind of benchmark; i just play it a bit (flat) and them quickly crossfade (most cases, several times) to some other tune i want to compare; By doing that, i manage do identify the tunes with lower sound quality by nowadays standards. That really helps me a lot with equalization. Most times, i just can’t spot any big difference in quality without making a comparison.
Maybe i’m not the right person to comment this topic, because i just don’t spin house or trance or dubstep. I have three different kinds of gigs, namely indie, rock/metal and lounge/nu jazz; so I’m constantly dealing with different production values, spawning for different decades. So for me it’s not a matter of WAV versus MP3@320, it’s a matter of how the musics were recorded and produced. Never Enough (Cure, 1990) simply doesn’t sound the same way as Monarchy of Roses (Red Hot Chili Peppers, 2011). Joy Division versus Muse, Dizzy Gillespie versus Thievery Corporation, Iron Maiden Versus Slipknot…. I’m always struggling with this. But it helps me to anticipate big differences in sound. Also i always pick the best sounding tunes for sound check purposes. While mixing, several times i don’t play first and tweak the eq. knobs later, I do exactly the opposite.
So, to all indie DJ’s out there, this is my 5 cents (ok 2 cents lol)
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