What size room for 8" monitors? What size monitor for apartment bedroom?

bluesfordan

Member
I had been told on a couple of occasions that the 8" monitors (20.3cm) I had were probably too big for the rooms I used to have available. I was curious if there is a consensus on what size speaker fits what size room. I know that the reflection points matter.

I'm in a typical apartment size bedroom, about 10' wide (3m) and maybe a little longer at 20 something feet (6m), with 7'10" ceiling (2.4m). It's actually probably bigger than my old irregular shaped room but has all vertical walls (no dormers) and a higher ceiling but it is a big shoebox for shape.

Applying sound treatment to the walls is probably not going to be in the cards. We don't plan to stay here past the end of our one year lease (8 more months). I don't want to unbox the 8" monitors I bought and never opened. I do want to hear my recordings via something other than headphones due to ear fatigue from the pressure.

I'm on the fence about keeping the NIB monitors or selling them to fund a smaller pair. For a bedroom setup, what size monitors would you recommend. I'm not recording EDM or rap or anything bass heavy. Previously I had been using an ancient stereo receiver and radio shack bookshelf mini speakers just to get something out into the air. I would prefer a less awkward solution.
 
The size of the speakers has nothing to do with how the room will respond except in that bigger ones might produce more lower frequency content for your room to fuck up. More powerful speakers might also just want to be louder than you’d like to have that close to you. There are easy things you can do to compensate for those things if it’s actually a problem.
 
I heard some people talking about this, and to be honest, being ancient - we learned our job working with the biggest speakers we could afford. I fondly remember my Tannoy 15" and wish I'd never got rid of them. Small speakers now don't mean the bass is weak, because the speaker design has been tweaked to make them more efficient, but the reality always was, and still is that bigger speakers are more efficient at moving air - however, the cones being big means they're more prone to negative physical aspects like inertia, momentum and the physics stuff. I guess you just need to buy speakers that you can work with. Those tiny Neumann speakers seem very popular with older recordists because they don't sound small. Some small speakers sound dreadful. I have a pair of Edirol speakers with I think, 5" drivers and the bass is way, way too much. I guess most people like that excessiveness at the bottom end. My own test is simple - do the mixes I produce sound good on a variety of systems? I always have to watch I don't overdo the bass, but I'm used to that.
 
Get 'em out and give 'em a blow Blue!
That room is bigger than those used by many who come here, it is bigger than my 'stoodio'.
You also have the benefit of a good longer dimension at 20ft (22.5 Hz half wavelength) so make sure the speakers fire down it. Also grab a copy of the current Sound on Sound the technical editor has an article about him treating his own studio and it is not much bigger than your room. Yes, ok he had $3k to splash on it but if allowed just buy some rockwool or GF, leave it in the bags and stack it in the corners. When you move you will have it to make some better looking traps.

Dave.
 
I've used 15" Tannoys in a room that was about 8ft X 12ft. Possibly not ideal but they still sounded great and told me what I needed to know about my recordings.

I don't normally subscribe to the idea that speakers can be too big for the room but there are exceptions. Speakers that radiate from both front and back (like Quad ESL's) require plenty of space and absorption behind the speaker otherwise the sound radiating from the rear combines in a destructive way with the sound from the front. I've heard ESL63's in a small room and the results weren't great.
 
There really is no simple relationship between cone size and LF performance. To reproduce bass you need driving cone ares AND displacement and because historically the latter was hard to provide, good bass came from large cones (12" in even domestic hi fi) with very limited pk-pk displacement. Such speakers live on for the guitarists!

So, you can have ever smaller cones but moving further but there is a limit and that is power handling. You simply cannot get rid of the heat fast enough from a 4" cone speaker. Also, as both cone and box size go down, system resonance goes up and it is VERY hard to get undistorted sound from a speaker below its resonance and it requires prodigious amounts of power. CAN be done with tricks like 'motional feedback' and DSP but at a cost.

So, there is no reason why a pair of 5" monitors could not make a complete dog's of the bass performance in a bad room JUST as well as a 3 way with a 10" woofer!

Dave.
 
The fact you are moving in 8 months is not an excuse not to acoustically treat the room. Build or buy some rockwool/OC703 panels - 2'x4'x4", hang or place them in corners, behind the speakers, at side points. Easy to move when you do leave.
 
Maybe what's the smallest woofer I can get away with in regards to room size should be the question..
Response down to the pressure zone energizing all room modes.

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Screenshot_2020-05-27 9780240522401_recording_studio_design_4235 pdf.png
 
Hi Sasquatch -

using the formula in your post, I got a cut off frequency of 25.6

What does this mean to the noob to this stuff? Would it mean that if I were trying to listen or record something at or below that point my room would pretty much make that unlikely?

Following that logic, my old music room with the 3 m length would have had a cutoff frequency of 57.2, which seems as though it would make low e on the bass less than emphasized? Conversely, if I turned up the EQ on the recording until I heard the low e in the old room, the mix would be very bassy when played on other systems in different i.e. bigger spaces.

Hmm, how do we get any bass response in the cabin of a car, then? Are the stereos tuned to compensate for vehicular interior volume?
 
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