How big do nearfield speakers need to be?

D

Delmont

Member
I read that nearfield speakers are good for small home studios. My music room is about 5' x 8', so I bought a pair of 5" M-Audio BX5 monitors.

They're useless. I mean, they look nice on my desk, but no one seems my music room, anyway. My old open-back Sennheiser headphones are much better for hearing my mixes, even though pros mostly say to use monitors, not headphones.

So how big do nearfields have to be to be at all useful? 8"? 10"?

And for bonus points, does anyone make them with knobs on the front instead of the back? (I HATE those rear knobs!)

Thanks!
 
Run a sweep with a MIC at your listening position and checkout the response in a DAW plug-in Frequency Analyzer
 
The size really only determines the frequency response. Try positioning them in an equilateral triangle to yourself with the tweeters at ear level if you haven't already. You can buy the best monitors on the market and render them useless with incorrect placement. I personally run two Hi-Fi bookshelf speakers (that I picked up for free!) on my desk raised to ear level and positioned in the equilateral triangle. They aren't as accurate as a pair of HS5s would be, but they work very well not only for listening to music but also as mixing monitors. Of course I have my AKG cans on the side to check for problems that were not revealed by the speakers.
 
There's no reason someone shouldn't be able to mix a good record on 5" or 6" nearfields but when moving from cans to monitors you need to consider the environment.....a lot!

You have good advice above but, with 5'x8' to work with, I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up going back to the headphones, as much as mixing on cans is not ideal. :(
 
Yup, have the triangle - about 2.5'x2.5'x2.5'.

I guess I also wonder about the brand. I've used PAs with JBL, and Yamaha speakers and gotten good sound, but I'm not at all familiar with M-Audio. Are there other brands that have a better sound? I saw an ad for a pair of used 8" PreSonus Eris E8 monitors, for instance. An improvement? Which brands are good? Which are bad?
 
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The bx5 and bx8 aren't the best. The KRKs are a lot better IMO (very nice tweeters that make EQing highs a breeze) but get the 6". The 5" KRKs are good compared to their competitors but too strongly ported for my taste so it's better to spend the extra.
 
2.5 will be null for much if you have them on the log wall. That will show up just listening to a sweep
 
That's one small room for mixing. If it's not treated I can imagine a lot of reflections of the walls.
I can only recommend what I know works for me. YMMV. I have TR8's, which cost me about $600 years ago.
They're ok, nice and flat with an 8" woofer.
My first thought is to keep mixing on HP and take it out to the car for a second opinion, until you get a bigger room.
 
ido1957 said:
That's one small room for mixing. If it's not treated I can imagine a lot of reflections of the walls.
I can only recommend what I know works for me. YMMV. I have TR8's, which cost me about $600 years ago.
They're ok, nice and flat with an 8" woofer.
My first thought is to keep mixing on HP and take it out to the car for a second opinion, until you get a bigger room.
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Thanks, gang! That helps.

The room isn't very reflective, and it's all I have. I generally listen to mixes on a cheap basement stereo, a good living room stereo, and the car stereo.
 
That room is way too small to be able to treat acoustically and have enough room to mix in. Larger monitors won't help, they'll just give you more low frequencies bouncing around.
In a room that small, good headphones - and checking your mixes on other systems to see how they translate - is your only solution.
 
That's what I do. The nearfields turned out to be a waste of money. But with the little plastic dinosaurs I have standing on them, they look too good to get rid of. Yet.
 
This isn't a solution by any stretch but if they're there and you're keeping them, try to monitor at very low levels.
I had an awful sounding room when I was at college and couldn't do anything about it but monitoring quietly and closer than normal, whilst not ideal, did help a fair bit.

I suppose it's the monitoring equivalent of singing very close to the mic in a bad room.
You're tipping the balance of direct sound to reflected sound in your favour.

Instead of scrabbling to book their mastering suite as often as possible, I booked it for an hour once a fortnight and just make rough notes on where I'd been going wrong,
I ended up getting 90% of the work done in my place and had a final tweaking session in their place right at the end. Worked out well.
 
Thanks! I already sing close to the mic - the old eat-the-mic school of singing. I only lean away when I'm live on stage and shouting. (I don't shout when I record. Don't have to!)

The room is small, but the ceiling, floor, and most of the walls are soft and irregular (cloth, foam, rug, uneven joists, shelves full of crappoo), so there's no reflected slap-back.

The biggest problem with the monitors is that when the bass sounds right, the actual recording is boomy. So if I use them (instead of the headphones), I have to dial the bass down to where I almost can't hear it and hope I haven't lost it altogether. That's why I wondered if bigger speakers and a better brand would help.

From what you're all saying, sounds like it wouldn't.
 
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No, it's still positioning the speakers to work in your room and electronic room correction - not that bx5 are gonna' be powerhouses
 
Bring the basement stereo into the room temporarily? That'll at least give you some perspective. It is very much more than likely that the soft and irregular nature of the surfaces means close to nothing at lower frequencies.

It occurs to me that in a room this small it might (???) be worth it to put the speakers either side of the listening position probably and preferably back from the forward wall. The idea being that we want the first reflections to go a lot further than the direct sound in order to minimize interference. It probably won't help in the low end. This is a hypothesis only, of course.
 
If the speakers are on the short wall, at least he can move back and forth a bit to find a spot. On the long wall, there is nowhere for the head to go, or, the sound to go. What's with those speaker stands ? hahah
 
The spot seems okay. The tweeters are both aimed at my face and the triangle is pretty equilateral.

The headphones will probably always win, anyhow.
 
"The spot seems okay. The tweeters are both aimed at my face and the triangle is pretty equilateral".

That won't get anyone very far. Do you even know what a null is ?
 
garww said:
"The spot seems okay. The tweeters are both aimed at my face and the triangle is pretty equilateral".

That won't get anyone very far. Do you even know what a null is ?
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Null is my interest in using the monitors. The headphones work better.
 
Delmont said:
Thanks! I already sing close to the mic - the old eat-the-mic school of singing. I only lean away when I'm live on stage and shouting. (I don't shout when I record. Don't have to!)
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That's cool. It was just a comparison.
You can use direct/reflection ratio to your advantage when monitoring, in the same way.

Delmont said:
The biggest problem with the monitors is that when the bass sounds right, the actual recording is boomy. So if I use them (instead of the headphones), I have to dial the bass down to where I almost can't hear it and hope I haven't lost it altogether. That's why I wondered if bigger speakers and a better brand would help.
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Sounds like your room is accentuating bass frequencies and you're having to compensate.
There's not a huge amount you can do in terms of quick fixes...I guess you already know.

Treat the room - Use headphones instead - Monitor quieter and closer - Try to get used to it and know how your space sounds.
Those are probably the main options available to you.

It's far from ideal but a lot of us probably do have to get used to how 'wrong' our space is, and learn to compensate for that.
A combination of listening to commercial reference material at your mixing setup, and checking your mixes (against commercial) on a range of other playback systems might help.
 
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