DrewPeterson7
Sage of the Order
Ok, over at another waaaaay less recording focused board I read, I keep seeing people post things like "in a small room of the size you're in, you shouldn't use monitors with a driver larger than 6"" or things like that. I admittedly haven't been looking, but I never see comments like that here, and the whole premise doesn't make much sense to me.
I have to assume we're talking about largely untreated rooms here. I guess the only argument I can think of is in a relatively small, untreated room, an 8" driver produces more bass than a 5" or 6", and in an untreated acoustic space that extra low end is just going to get lost in a wash of phase cancellation and leave you with an unreliable low end. Fair enough. But, dealing with this by jumping to say a 5" speaker, well, wouldn't that only "solve" the problem if it just wasn't faithfully reproducing those frequencies anyway? At which point, you've just switched from one problem to another (phase cancellation in the very low end to no reproduction in the very low end) and you're left with the same symptom - you can't trust your monitors' low frequencies. This is to say nothing of all the midrange and flutter problems you likely have anyway in an untreated room.
Idunno, I've never heard a really good physics-based argument as to why switching to a smaller driver might actually help in a small room, and I figured if there's any forum I read that could provide a good explanation, it's this one.
I have to assume we're talking about largely untreated rooms here. I guess the only argument I can think of is in a relatively small, untreated room, an 8" driver produces more bass than a 5" or 6", and in an untreated acoustic space that extra low end is just going to get lost in a wash of phase cancellation and leave you with an unreliable low end. Fair enough. But, dealing with this by jumping to say a 5" speaker, well, wouldn't that only "solve" the problem if it just wasn't faithfully reproducing those frequencies anyway? At which point, you've just switched from one problem to another (phase cancellation in the very low end to no reproduction in the very low end) and you're left with the same symptom - you can't trust your monitors' low frequencies. This is to say nothing of all the midrange and flutter problems you likely have anyway in an untreated room.
Idunno, I've never heard a really good physics-based argument as to why switching to a smaller driver might actually help in a small room, and I figured if there's any forum I read that could provide a good explanation, it's this one.