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Old 03-25-2014, 01:28 PM   #1
tspring
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Default Showroom where high end monitors can be compared?

Google has failed me. I have tried to find a showroom anywhere on the East coast of the the US where it might be possible to do comparison listening of a reasonable selection of high end audio monitors (more acccurately, in the price range up to $3000 for a pair), but have not yet been successful. Does such a place even exist?

Suggestions would be welcome.

T
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Old 03-27-2014, 07:59 PM   #2
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Google has failed me. I have tried to find a showroom anywhere on the East coast of the the US where it might be possible to do comparison listening of a reasonable selection of high end audio monitors (more acccurately, in the price range up to $3000 for a pair), but have not yet been successful. Does such a place even exist?

Suggestions would be welcome.

T
My local guitar center has a studio space setup with some of the common monitors in that price range, but any big store is going to be sub-optimal for careful listening comparisons.

Your best bet is probably to order a few pairs from someplace with a liberal return policy, and then send back the ones you don't want. Places like Sweetwater or GCPro tend to be very accommodating to this approach.

If you can get there, places like Vintage King in Nashville, Dale Pro Audio in NYC, or Mercenary Audio in Boston (are they still open?) will let you compare some very high end monitors in a very high-end setting, but the prices might be a little out of your range (and markups tend to be significantly higher at boutique shops like this).

B&H Photo in NYC is a really cool place to visit (closed Saturdays, though), and they will definitely have some stuff in your price range, but it's kind of a zoo, and probably not an optimal place to do controlled listening comparisons. I believe Sweetwater and GC Pro have showroom in IN and CA, respectively.

Most of the independent mid-tier showrooms have gone out of business, I think. A challenge to what you are looking for is that brick-and-mortar stores can only survive one of two ways: high volume, or high markup. A store that sells kilobuck speakers in a quiet environment has to pay staff, rent, overhead, and finance/carrying costs on all those thousand-dollar speakers, and they are not going to be selling 100 pairs of speakers a day. In fact, it might be more like 10 pairs a week. Which means they need to be making maybe $500-1000 per pair sold, just to keep the doors open and a couple of full-time employees fed and clothed.

Now, if you're outfitting a multi-million dollar THX Cineplex with new IMAX systems, or shopping for a $20,000 surround-system for a commercial studio, then maybe that's not big deal. But if you're talking, say, Event Opals or ADAM A7s or JBL LSR at $1500-$3000 per pair, you're probably not willing to part with an extra $700 over internet prices, just to get a quiet showroom experience (and even if you are, not enough other people are to keep these places open, usually).

The old independent stores used to be really good about letting you put a hold on a credit card, take the stuff with you, and try it out in your own studio. The new version of that is buying it online (much cheaper) from a place with a liberal return policy, which is effectively the same thing.

Have fun!
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Old 03-27-2014, 08:35 PM   #3
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A very perceptive (and somewhat sad) reply from Yep. Mercenary Audio has indeed closed, but they are hoping to make a comeback online. At least we still have Fenway Park
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Old 03-28-2014, 07:00 AM   #4
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Thanks to you all for taking time to respond.

Yep, I suspected that the answer to my question would be just something like what you say. We might try a visit to Dale Pro, but given your comments on price, more likely I'll check with Sweetwater on sending a couple of speakers to try. I must admit that I am a little nervous about shipping monitors. A few years ago, my son (Shea), who has a degree in industrial design, built a one-of-a-kind chair using epoxy impregnated felt on a cast aluminum frame (http://www.ampersandbrand.com/sputnik.html). We needed to ship it via FedEx to a show for display, but my wife questioned whether it was safe to ship it by regular FedEx. I responded that the way the chair was built, they would have to run over it with a truck to damage it. Well guess what happened? They ran over it with a truck!

SMM, thanks for the suggestion, as mk2's had not been on my radar screen. Top contenders up to now have been Event Opal or 2030's, Adam 7 or 8, Genelecs of various ilk, and Equator D8s. Had been leaning toward one of the Event models, but it is really hard to make a rational choice. I don't trust specs to tell the story, nor do I believe that hearing monitors that "sound good" on a single listen is a useful guide to selecting monitors that will help make mixes that translate well across a broad range of playback devices. I know your thought processes well enough to trust your opinions, so your feedback on how the mk2 monitors translate is very helpful.

T
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Old 03-28-2014, 07:49 AM   #5
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just to play devils advocate a bit, I've been moving my monitors ever so slightly up, down, wider, narrower, further from back wall etc, on stands, not on stands, and the differences in (measured) response in my room is huge, so if you do get excellent monitors I hope you pay as much attention to placement and room treatment, inches either way could make you think a set suck when they may not. with that budget i'm sure you will do them justice - maybe i'm saying for the benefit of other readers!

I decided to retain my budget pair and treat my room and get ARC instead of going all out for wallet crushers.
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Old 03-28-2014, 07:08 PM   #6
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A very perceptive (and somewhat sad) reply from Yep. Mercenary Audio has indeed closed, but they are hoping to make a comeback online. At least we still have Fenway Park
I think it's not necessarily as sad as it might seem. More and better gear is available to way more people than back when I was trying out $4,000 ADATs on spec from EU Wurlitzer. Just about any 8-channel USB interface sounds better than those did, and a lot of them come with pretty decent preamps, at 10% of the price, in non-inflation-adjusted dollars, no less.

Mercenary Audio was a really cool place to stop by and have a beer on the few times I was there, and Fletcher is one of the funniest and most passionate guys in the industry. I also always loved their T-shirts: "We're not happy till you're not happy" and "This is not a problem" were two of my favorites, and I think I still have one someplace that I got from an old roommate...

Fletcher is an emotional and passionate guy with an acerbic wit, and he took his job seriously and personally. He's the guy who famously skewered an ADAT and a Mackie mixer on a pike at NAMM and labelled the skewer "shit on a stick".

I am certain that he never intentionally steered anyone wrong, per se, and he genuinely did care about high-quality sound, and put a lot of effort into explaining and showing people how to use gear better, and how to get the most out of it, and he genuinely cared about helping people select and use the right gear. (Note that the same could be said for a lot of people who write reviews on forums or on Amazon.com, these days...)

But Fletcher/Mercenary was extremely slow to acknowledge that digital and computers could have any place in studio recording. He had an irrational and hyperbolic disdain for anything and everything "prosumer", and especially in the past 15 years or so, seemed to have a knee-jerk and unsavory tendency to put down anything that wasn't distributed exclusively through boutique specialty purveyors like Mercenary, or else through the used market. I think it became a defense mechanism about his eroding livelihood and industry that anything sold at "Banjo Depot" must necessarily be disposable crap for teenyboppers making necessarily shitty "beats" on their video-game boxes.

When Mercenary finally acknowledged the existence of computers in audio, there was something sad and bitter about it. There was an attitude like, "we hired this girl who knows about computers and stuff, and we worked out a deal with this thing Nuendo and a company called Bomb Factory that makes computer effects, but the rest of it is all SHIT and SUCKS and will RUIN YOUR MUSIC." It was like, "yeah, we realize that you might need one of those video-game boxes for the tennyboppers, so here's the stuff our computer gal says you should put on it (at 50% markup), but don't go poisoning your studio with any of that other crap that's out there..."

What's sad is that Fletcher got his start and built his reputation by being the no-bullshit, reasonably-priced dealer who wouldn't waste your money, and who gave expert and honest advice, including telling you when to simply buy something used. He famously told anyone who asked that his favorite mic was the Shure SM57, which he didn't even sell. In the 90s, when the first wave of (genuinely shitty-sounding) digital "prosumer" gear came to market, he was the guy who would tell you how to find a used tape-machine and mixing desk for cheaper, and what preamps to buy, and where and how to get an old radio-broadcast mic that was better-made and better-sounding than the early wave of crappy Chinese capsules.

He was a legend at the both the high-end and the low-end of the markets, and would give his expert opinions and advice to anyone and everyone, from roadies to rock-stars to unknown garage-bands.

But I think the times got away from him, and his no-bullshit attitude gradually turned into a shtick, and then a kind of reactionary philosophy, and eventually into a kind of marketing bullshit itself. The audio world HAS moved on. The low-end, and especially the digital world, has improved logarithmically since the first wave of ADATs and ProTools.

It's no longer true that anything not hand-made by post-war German engineers or personal friends of Fletcher is "shit on a stick", and it hasn't been true for a long time. Moreover, and this is mostly a good thing, it's no longer a world divided cleanly into marketing fluff versus expert gatekeeper like Fletcher. There are tons of places to find honest, knowledgeable reviews, audio shootouts, user-experience, usage-data, and so on.
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Old 03-28-2014, 08:45 PM   #7
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Hadn't been to a showroom in a long time. If your into diy stuff, some of the best sounding speakers I've heard are from a kit. I have a pair my brother made for me. They are two way sealed box design, using scanspeak drivers, and custom crossovers.

Some of these kits be had from Madisound. http://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com...-speaker-kits/

Alot of the scanspeak drivers are used in hi end monitors.

http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/ScanSpeak.htm

Just thought I'd mention it.

Regards, Wyatt
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Old 03-28-2014, 10:42 PM   #8
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Hadn't been to a showroom in a long time. If your into diy stuff, some of the best sounding speakers I've heard are from a kit. I have a pair my brother made for me. They are two way sealed box design, using scanspeak drivers, and custom crossovers.

Some of these kits be had from Madisound. http://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com...-speaker-kits/

Alot of the scanspeak drivers are used in hi end monitors.

http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/ScanSpeak.htm

Just thought I'd mention it.

Regards, Wyatt
Cool links.

I think in general, if you are willing to look into the audiophile world as opposed to the official "pro audio" world, you can find a lot of speakers, equipment, info, and value from a DIY perspective. But there is also a ton of woowoo and bogus/confusing pseudo-science to wade through, not to mention a fair amount of outright bullshit, way more than in pro audio circles. Also, generous return policies are few and far between, and credible reviewers are harder to find.

For most sane mortals, the market for powered nearfields is so aggressive and competitive these days that your time has to be worth very little for you to research, source, design, and build a speaker that is better and cheaper than what you can buy off the shelf with a warranty and return policy, right now.
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Old 03-30-2014, 10:15 AM   #9
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Originally Posted by WyattRice View Post
Hadn't been to a showroom in a long time. If your into diy stuff, some of the best sounding speakers I've heard are from a kit. I have a pair my brother made for me. They are two way sealed box design, using scanspeak drivers, and custom crossovers.

Some of these kits be had from Madisound. http://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com...-speaker-kits/

Alot of the scanspeak drivers are used in hi end monitors.

http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/ScanSpeak.htm

Just thought I'd mention it.

Regards, Wyatt
Thanks Wyatt,

I am usually very much a DI guy. I have built speakers before, did all the calculations based on Thiel/Small parameters to to get f3 cutoff below 50Hz, optimized cabinet dimensions to minimize standing waves, calculated bass port velocities to prevent whooshing, tried to align drivers for phase coherence, did all the calculations to make sure response was flat through the crossover point. They sounded fine, but I couldn't tell you how well I did with the overall design when all was said and done as I don't have the appropriate measurement gear to assess the response characteristics that I actually achieved. And at the moment, I just don't want to deal with this kind of uncertainty.

I think that doing a good job of selecting studio monitors is one of the hardest parts of picking studio equipment. I am a scientist by training, and normally I like to make decisions based on objective measurements when I can. There are plenty of specs that can tell you something about monitor performance, but there is a complication that makes reliance on these specs problematic. The problem is that the audience who will be listening to the music that you are trying to mix will not be listening on high fidelity systems most of the time. So the idea that you want to use monitors that will help you make mixes that translate well onto those systems becomes important. As far as I can tell, looking for top notch specs does not do a good job of predicting how well monitors will serve in this role. That is why I was very interested in SMM's comments regarding translation of mixes.

The set of monitors that we are buying is going into my son's commercial studio. The studio has supported him reasonably well over the last couple of years, and business is picking up at a fairly rapid pace, but we have both begun to question whether his current monitors are making his job harder than it needs to be. Regardless of the microphones used, or the preamps, *everything* generated in the studio is initially judged through the monitors, so the choice of new monitors could have real-life-effecting consequences.

As BenK-msx points out, placement of monitors and room treatment are also key, so on the one hand it makes some sense to save money on monitors and spend it on room treatment. But as YEP has pointed out in another thread, if you try economize too much on equipment, you can actually end up spending more if you repeatedly upgrade because you (wrongly or rightly) suspect that you might work better with better equipment. Also, we have already done a fair amount of room treatment, and reads YEPs comments elsewhere regarding the extreme difficulty of dealing with < 50 Hz. Still, there is a point of diminishing returns for increased expenditure at some ...

So many factors to juggle, but still key pieces of information are missing.

T

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Old 03-30-2014, 11:26 AM   #10
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Dale Pro audio in NYC has a handful of very nice monitors in their small listening room.
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Old 03-30-2014, 08:55 PM   #11
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For the DIY'ers out there, this guy designs ultra-high fidelity speakers, and explains his design choices and part selection process thoroughly. I hope to build a design or two of his soon, just to compare them to my current monitors.

http://zaphaudio.com/
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Old 03-30-2014, 09:43 PM   #12
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...There are plenty of specs that can tell you something about monitor performance, but there is a complication that makes reliance on these specs problematic...
FWIW, if you know how to read them and can find them, waterfall plots like the ones on pages 10-11 of this PDF are actually pretty telling:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...,d.cWc&cad=rjt
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Old 04-01-2014, 06:54 AM   #13
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Thanks semiquaver. We are contemplating a visit to Dale Pro on April 5. Do you know if their listening room is at their Manhattan site or the new Jamaica Queens site?

Thanks for the link DuraMorte. Great info on this site, enough to show how hard designing high quality speaker systems really is. The number of variables is large, and there are many trade-offs. It will take some time to wade through all of this. I will also come back to this site later when I am in DIY mode.

Yep, I find the waterfall plots to be very useful in understanding the responses of speakers, especially in the lower frequencies. You can easily see that the resonance and resulting time smearing of low frequency sounds of some systems will lead to poorly articulated bass, and this is indeed one of the main concerns that I have with our current monitors. Based on the waterfall plots included, NS-10s clearly have less undesirable resonance than almost any other monitor. But their frequency response linearity superficially appears to be almost unbelievably bad, and they have such limited low frequency response that the question of low frequency resonance is barely relevant to them.

The continued reverence for NS-10 monitors is one of the reasons that I have found choice of monitors based purely on specifications to be so tricky. In the publication that you kindly provided, the authors do some hand-waving to try to downplay the issue of poor frequency response linearity by hypothesizing that the free-air response would be linearized due to coupling of drivers to room volume, etc. However, applying Occam's razor brings me to the conclusion that the frequency response of NS-10 monitors simply mimic the responses of a broad range of consumer listening systems, and that is why they have stood the test of time.

Based on frequency response linearity, one of the clear winners in the set of monitors in the publication is the Mackie HR824. But the waterfall plots tell a different story, revealing extensive undesirable low frequency resonance. So we have information, but no clear way to properly weight the different factors in making a decision. Still, many thanks to you Yep for pointing me toward the waterfall plots. More information is always better than less, and having found wisdom in the things you have written over the years, I do value your opinions greatly.

T

PS: Looking at waterfall plots makes me want to avoid ported monitors. It appears to be difficult to avoid low frequency time domain problems when cabinets are ported to improve low frequency efficiency. Tradeoffs again.

Last edited by tspring; 04-02-2014 at 08:26 AM. Reason: Added a thought.
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Old 04-03-2014, 08:20 AM   #14
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some of the best looking waterfall plots I've seen FWIW are from PSI audio's monitors - in the time domain these may well be the most accurate monitors going.
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Old 04-03-2014, 06:32 PM   #15
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some of the best looking waterfall plots I've seen FWIW are from PSI audio's monitors - in the time domain these may well be the most accurate monitors going.
Thanks Seniquaver. But I think that I must be overlooking something. Comparing the wateerfall plot in Figure 7 in
http://www.psiaudio.com/sites/defaul...io%20A21-M.pdf to some of the monitors in the document that Yep posted, it seems that the time domain response of the PSI monitor in low frequency shows relatively large time smearing of impulses. Certainly the JBL LSR25 monitors look similar. What am I missing?

T

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Old 04-04-2014, 10:43 AM   #16
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More waterfall plots, and a generally worthwhile read:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Jun0...s/monitors.asp

Dynaudio BM5 and the KRK K-ROK monitors not looking very good on these.

Putting 2 and 2 together, I can see that it is nearly impossible to make a speaker/cabinet system that is efficient in the low frequencies and also does not have some type of resonance. Tuning of the dimensions of the cabinet and port is really a way of storing energy from the movement of the speaker so that movement of the air reinforces the next movement of the speaker. This more or less guarantees repeated back and forth movement of the speaker in reponse to an impulse, and this means that low frequency compressions and rarefactions resulting will be smeared out over time so that they are mixed with new speaker responses to newly arriving signals.

The fact that most of the monitors on the market these days are ported suggests to me that speaker designers may have realized that people who select monitors by ear are more likely to buy if they hear a good old thumpin' bass sound even if it is not clearly articulated.

Now of course, *I* wouldn't do that, now would I...?

T
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Old 04-04-2014, 11:50 AM   #17
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Quote:
More waterfall plots, and a generally worthwhile read:
At the end of the day, the best solution is going to be the monitors that make the waterfall plots of the listening space look best me thinks. IOW you probably won't find the perfect speaker and the room probably isn't either, it would be nice if you could find a set of monitors that lack what the room has and has some of what the room lacks. And/or adjust the room to fit the monitors which is part of what you would be doing anyway when shooting the room because the monitors are going to play their part in that adjustment either way.

You may have better luck combining stuff that results in flat rather than trying to find a bunch of flat stuff, combining and hoping it stays flat; interactions that result in what you want are likely the key.
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Old 04-04-2014, 12:03 PM   #18
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I misremembered: the impulse response is the remarkable feature of the PSIs + they use some cool design to iron out the phase across the spectrum. phase changes from 300 down are inevitable and not so important but in the critical range these are quite good. Ringing in the bottom is less of a critical issue I think for the reasons described above (interaction with room etc) and I think that listeners adjust for ringing psychologically. But phase coherence gives important cues and I think is the #1 thing to look for in a monitor at whatever bass extension level you are looking. So waterfalls are great but check out the impulse response and phase curves too.
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Old 04-04-2014, 07:06 PM   #19
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At the end of the day, the best solution is going to be the monitors that make the waterfall plots of the listening space look best me thinks.
True, but we can't know what the waterfall for the room will look like until we choose something to try. I know that room response will probably dominate in terms of problems, but on the other hand you can't correct what is already lost either. So I would still like to weight the waterfall plots heavily in choosing what to try out. In the end, I have a feeling that I may have to weight cost more than I would like to. Everything that has a good looking waterfall plot is just at the edge of our budget or beyond it.

Quote:
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I misremembered: the impulse response is the remarkable feature of the PSIs + they use some cool design to iron out the phase across the spectrum. phase changes from 300 down are inevitable and not so important but in the critical range these are quite good. Ringing in the bottom is less of a critical issue I think for the reasons described above (interaction with room etc) and I think that listeners adjust for ringing psychologically. But phase coherence gives important cues and I think is the #1 thing to look for in a monitor at whatever bass extension level you are looking. So waterfalls are great but check out the impulse response and phase curves too.
Got it. Everybody in Europe seems gaga over the PSI monitors. Nobody has a bad word to say about them, and there are many superlatives used. I would really love to hear a pair of these. Unfortunately, there are only two PSI distributors in the US, and a pair of PSI Audio A21-M monitors cost about $5000 US. You are in the UK aren't you? Perhaps they are cheaper there, as they are made in Switzerland.

I would really like to see a waterfall plot for Genelec M040's, but I can't find one online. Anyone?

T
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Old 04-05-2014, 06:47 AM   #20
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I suggest that you consider Eve Audio also. The company was started by the co-founder and former CEO of ADAM Audio. They provide great value for the money, especially considering that they are made in Germany. I bought a pair of Eve Audio monitors last year after comparing with Adam, Genelec, Focal, Yamaha and Neumann monitors in the same price range or slightly higher. I had never heard of the brand until I met the North American distributor at the AES Convention in New York last October. He noticed from my badge that I actually lived only a few kilometers away from him. Small world.
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Old 04-05-2014, 10:58 AM   #21
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For that kind of cost, go with the Bowers & Wilkins 800 Series... NOTHING better!

http://www.bowers-wilkins.com/Speake...Series_Diamond
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Old 04-06-2014, 02:27 AM   #22
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Pattste, Eve Audio monitors definitely are amongst the top contenders. Lots of folks seem to think highly of them.

Cincikat69, B&W monitors are indeed top notch too. And the fact that their top-of-the line monitors have been used at Abbey Roads studios for years surely tugs at me emotionally. Not to mention that they are really cool looking. The Diamond 850 monitors run over $5000 though, and we can't go quite that high.
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Old 04-06-2014, 03:03 AM   #23
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Default Too bad about those waterfall plots...

I have moved from trying unsuccessfully to find a showroom that would allow comparisons of monitors to unsuccessfully attempting to obtain waterfall and impulse response information about the monitors of interest. As a result of the dearth of waterfall and impulse response plots, the ideal of comparing and selecting monitors based on hard data seems unobtainable.

Nonetheless, the discussion in this thread has focused our attention more and more on the time domain of speaker response. Shea and I spent several hours discussing this yesterday, and in the course of the discussion, we finally decided that we wanted to try non-ported monitors because of the advantages in low frequency time domain of such designs. The best sealed cabinet monitors that we have found that fit within our budget are Unity Audio's "The Rock MKII" monitors (about $2500 for a pair). Reviewers often comment that the United Audio monitors seem to have the expected good performance in the time domain, and can thus be very revealing in the low frequencies,(for example https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr...itytherock.htm).

We would like to compare the Unity Audio monitors to Event Opal monitors (cannot find waterfall plots for either), but it doesn't appear that any distributor carries both. The Unity Audio monitors are made in the UK and there are only a couple of distributors in the US, so getting a pair sent for a trial might be tricky. At least it will be short work to figure out who has the best return policies for the Unity Audio units.

Thanks to everyone for all of the input. It has been very helpful.

T

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Old 04-06-2014, 07:03 AM   #24
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Here's another company that makes monitors. I think they are in Maryland. I've heard them, and they sound great.

http://lipinskisound.com/products/main-speaker-l-707/

http://lipinskisound.com/professional/
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Old 04-06-2014, 07:08 AM   #25
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You might also want to take a look/listen to the Equator Audio Q10's.
http://www.equatoraudio.com/equator-...itor-p/q10.htm
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Old 04-07-2014, 03:50 AM   #26
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Originally Posted by WyattRice View Post
Here's another company that makes monitors. I think they are in Maryland. I've heard them, and they sound great.

http://lipinskisound.com/products/main-speaker-l-707/

http://lipinskisound.com/professional/

Thanks Wyatt, if I have heard of Lipinski monitors before, the name has slipped my mind, but list of places where they are used makes it clear that they are world class. Very unusual sealed cabinet design with foam/felt baffle around the tweeter. Unfortunately they are really expensive. As much as I would like to ghave truly world class monitors, these are just too much of a budgetary stretch. On the other hand, I surely would love to hear them. I see that nearby Blueroom studios uses Lipenskies. Perhaps I could hear them there.

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Old 04-07-2014, 04:55 AM   #27
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I recently bought a pair of Unity Audio The Rock IIs, in the face of listening to the Neumann KH120, Focal solo and twin, plus many others.

Dont know if they are avilable in the US but if they are give them a listen.
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Old 04-07-2014, 02:03 PM   #28
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I recently bought a pair of Unity Audio The Rock IIs, in the face of listening to the Neumann KH120, Focal solo and twin, plus many others.

Dont know if they are avilable in the US but if they are give them a listen.
A pair of Unity Audio The Rock mkIIs are on their way from ZenPro audio (http://www.zenproaudio.com/), the only Unity Audio distributor on the East coast of the US. We are also trying to arrange to get Opal Events and Mackie HR824s for comparison. Opals are in the contest because there are so many glowing reviews. The Mackies are on the list because they are use a passive radiator instead of an open port and because of their (relatively) low price (also because of SMM's comments on how well mixes made listening to HR824s translate and because I think that we can get them locally). It will be interesting to hear them side by side. The waterfall plot for the Mackies doesn't look particularly good in the low frequencies. I am curious whether I will hear the difference, but foreknowledge of the waterfall plot does make my judgement higly questionable.

Joe Engineer, the Equator Q10s are very interesting monitors too. I did consider them earlier, as I have heard many good things about Equator monitors in general. In fact I can't remember why I dropped them from the short list as the price is really good for what you are getting. Too many choices...why the heck couldn't I just have waterfall plots for everything?

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Old 04-23-2014, 01:17 AM   #29
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A/B comparisons of monitors are in progress. Here is a photo of our control room showing the Unity Audio The Rock MkII and Event Opal monitors that we are auditioning



The Unity Audio The Rock MkII speakers are on their sides with Event Opals on top. Our old Mackie Tapco S8 monitors http://www.glenngutierrez.com/2005/11/review-tapco are not in the picture. The larger consumer style speakers that you see are an unported design made by Acculab that have a very clearly articulated low frequency response. The Acculabs are relevant because A/B comparison of the Acculab speakers to the Tapcos that we did a few months ago made it clear that the low frequency response of the Tapcos was badly garbled due to cabinet/speaker resonance.

Both the Event Opal and the Unity Audio monitors sound great, but surpringly, there are differences that are not hard to hear. I had assumed that it would be rather difficult to tell them apart.

We almost immediately developed a preference for Unity Audio monitors, but have been listening for several days to make sure that original impressions were dependable. Will post more details later.

Last edited by tspring; 04-23-2014 at 01:53 AM.
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Old 04-24-2014, 12:54 PM   #30
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Wait till you have the Rocks on their own, upright and in the right sweet spot.

A couple of months in and I am still loving mine.

But I have hung onto my little Tannoy system 6s as well.....
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