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Old 12-29-2008, 07:34 PM   #104
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by munge View Post
Great stuff. My own recordings can be described as boomy colored mud embedded in hiss, with ocasional hard-limiting noise. A few items.

"The two most common speakers used in the history of studio recording are certainly Yamaha NS10s and little single-driver Auratones."

Aren't reference monitors, and all little boxes, seriously unfaithful (you're playing bass through something that no bassist would ever play through)? Aren't they just overpriced imitations of bad speakers that the audience uses? And I'm paying for what, the manufacturer's R&D-ing just how /uniform/ they can deliver the mediocrity? Any problem substituting mediocre old KEF or newer Sony bookshelves? Just like an OK soundcard, they too can convey some of the innovative brilliance of a good recording.
First off, great questions from a first-time poster. And my guess is that for everyone who actually posts a question, there are probably a hundred others wondering. And it's hard for me to tell whether I'm moving too fast or too slow without feedback, so kudos.

If you find a set of bookshelf speakers that work well as monitors, go for it. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, not in the price tag nor in the label or brand designation. The pudding, in this case, is NOT your ability to make good-sounding records on that set of speakers, nor in the speaker's ability to convey the innovative brilliance of the recorded music (the brilliance or lack thereof is in the performance, not the speaker). The pudding is when you are making records that sound consistent, balanced, and essentially the same on every other speaker system.

When you listen to a commercial recording, it pretty much sounds the same whatever speaker system you play it back on-- in the car, in a bar, on headphones or at Redbone's. That does not mean that the sound quality is not affected by the speakers, just that the mix and the underlying recorded material itself sounds like the same material, just played through different speakers, and ideally it sounds pretty good on everything. But if you have ever mixed a record on headphones or on a home hifi system, I bet you have experienced the effect of popping the test CD into a friend's car or your girlfriend's home stereo and hearing something that sounds totally different from what you mixed at home. The bass is way off, the balance of instruments is all screwed up, you can't hear the vocal (or it's way too loud), the cymbals either sound pingy or like white-noisy trash-- in short, nothing sounds right. It sounds like a totally different mix from what you had at home.

The reason for this is that most home systems these days are designed to alter and flatter the sound in frequency-, dynamics-, and phase-dependent ways. An obvious analogy is the kinds of "SRS WOW" effects and sonic maximizers/aural enhancers that are built into a lot of mp3 players and consumer electronics to hype the sound in various ways. Speakers are very often built the same way, and frankly this is actually worse for reference monitoring than simple "bad speakers." If you luck out on a set of inexpensive consumer bookshelf speakers, it will very likely be something pre-1990, from before CDs ushered in the new wave of inexpensive hi-fi, or else something specialized at the low-end of the dedicated "audiophile" market.

My experience is that Sonys and the like (even in the $300+ range) are going to be chock full of one-note-bass, big directional distortions that interfere with nearfield listening, crossover-frequency-related distortions, inconsistent frequency response at low volume, and smiley-curve "hype."

It wouldn't be my first choice, but I'd be okay with doing a record on Tivoli audio speakers if I had to. And Wharfedale Diamonds are supposed to work well. But those are already in the price range where you could just buy a set of Behringer Truths or something. I don't have a lot of exposure to low-end monitors, but they are probably made with at least a minimum level of faithful reproduction as a design goal, and for most people, buying an inexpensive set of dedicated-purpose reference monitors is probably cheaper and a lot faster than buying a dozen different sets of cheap bookshelf speakers and doing test mixes to see which if any work well as monitors.

You can of course try anything, and it's always better to get busy with whatever you have available than to stress and second-guess your gear, but If you find that your recordings are not sounding as good on other speakers as they sounded at home, or that you are having a hard time hearing the effects of subtle eq or compression, then monitors are the first thing to put on your shopping list.

With specific respect to NS10s and auratones, obviously the ideal monitors are probably better speakers than these, and if you can afford ADAMs or custom soffit-mounted $30,000 monsters, then go for it. But my guess is that most of those reading this thread are probably on a tighter budget. My point with the NS10s and auratones is that "great-sounding" speakers are not necessarily even desirable for reference monitoring. NS10s sound like "perfect" cheap speakers. And that means that they sound the same at low volume or high, they deliver consistent nearfield frequency dispersion, they do not compress or "hype" the sound, they deliver bass response that is focused and tonal down to the cutoff frequency, and they have a clear, even midrange.

None of the above applies to most consumer bookshelf speakers, even "good" ones, which are apt to have sloppy dispersion, "loose" bass response, very different frequency and dynamics response at different volume levels, and a midrange that is designed not for accuracy but to compensate for crossover distortion. It is really important to understand that none of this necessarily translates into "bad sound." In fact, for home listening, any of these might actually be desirable "features." But they're not good for reference monitoring.

As an aside, I'm going to touch on your example of "something that no bassist would ever play through," since it raises a great point. The surprising reality is that a majority, or at least a significant plurality of bass players play through exactly these speakers when it comes to modern studio recordings. The whole idea is that we are making records suitable for living-room listening or something similar, and standard practice is for the bass player to sit in the control room and either plug straight into the board or to hear the miked bass cab through the control room monitors. For purposes of the recording, this is exactly the sound that we care about. But even if the bass player is out in the live room playing with the band and hearing her amp sound, what you care about as the recordist is the sound as it's being captured, and how it translates in real-world playback.
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