Speakers for MD8

[Pete Burak]

Recently got a MD8. Ran it to my old home stereo but everything sounded overly muddy although CD's thru the stereo sound fine. Listened thru the headphone jack on the MD8 and everything sounded really good. I prefer to listen from speakers. I hear I need to get a set of "mixing" speakers.
Can anyone reccomend a brand/model of inexpensive but good sounding, small, powered speakers, that will sound good for recording/mixing in my living room?
I'm mainly recording acoustic guitar, bass, drum machine, vocals, and pedal steel guitar.
I also record pedal steel and vocals on top of existing midi back-up tracks.
Is it too much to ask to get that headphone sound out of a set of speakers?
Thanks in advance for the info.
Pete B.

[jontflesh]

Hey Pete,
Instead of getting some studio montitors this is what I did. Go to your local Best Buy or what ever and get one of those mini stereo's. I bought an Awai one for like 300.00 buckies and it sounds great. A decent set of powered monitors will easily cost that amount and with the mini stereo you get a cd player/tape deck and what ever. Also get really good cables to hook up the MD8 to the stereo, they do make a big diffrence. I prefer Monster Cable.
With headphones you really don't want to mix/master using just them. The sound is actually too good and when you then listen on a stereo the sound is messed up compared to the headphones.
Just my opinion though. :-)
jontflesh

[asland]

There's a good article in Recording Magazine, June 2000 that answers a lot of questions about why headphones aren't ideal for mixing. The main reason is "the binaural difference" or the fact that in a situation with headphones, each ear is too isolated from the "natural" sound it would hear from ordinarily mixing both sides of stereo. You can often get what seems like a clean mix through headphones only to put it on your stereo, sit back and suddenly hear a lot of glaring goofs. I think the idea of buying regular speakers over reference monitors is also an excellent idea. I have Alesis M1 active reference monitors and truthfully, I wish I had spent the money on a good pre-amp and regular old speakers. I've listened to my music both ways, monitors and speakers and what I mix on monitors I usually end-up red-mixing to fit a good set of stereo speakers.

[AmpJones]

I used to feel exactly the same way, and I must say now that I was wrong. I recently aquired a set of old JBL 4311 control monitors and suddenly I was hearing things I had never heard before out of my fairly good home speakers. I immediately went into remix mode, and the results were like night and day. It's as if someone had pulled a blanket out from in front of my speakers.

[Nilbog]

Commercial grade speakers are designed to sound good to the average consumer (i.e. more bass response, etc.). Monitors are designed to reproduce every frequency perfectly, so you can hear whats going on in the song. I bought a cheapy pair of powered, shielded Roland monitors, and I've found they reproduce they sound very good for how much I paid. Of course, they're not GREAT. So anyway, the point is that consumer grade speakers are harder to make a good mix on.
-Nil

[The Green Hornet]

Yo Pete:

I use a Yamaha AX 592 integrated amplifier for my studio because that's how I started, with stereo. You can, of course, buy a better amp alone, etc. But, the Yam 592 allows me to plug in CD, two tape decks with either way recording/playing, phono, and it has an AUX and it has a pure through switch which is also very cool. [recorded sound is not affected by the amp with this switch engaged.]

But, of course, you still need some decent speakers; I have two sets plugged into my amp; Infinities are commercical but not bad and I have a set of Alesis I monitors which are merely fair quality; I'm looking at better speakers like the Events; only thing is that the EVents come with 1/4 inch plugs or XLR and I haven't figured out how to patch that into my stereo amp. But, I'll bet someone out there knows how!

The Green Hornet