A thought about monitors

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JuSumPilgrim

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How many yorkville ysm1s have you seen on ebay?

None.

Theres a reason for that.



You find behringer, event, tannoy, krk, M-audio, and others on ebay all the time.

Theres a reason for that.



You can almost guage the quality of a given product by how many you find on ebay.
 
Notice how many pro audio magazines show photos of pro studios with Event and Yamaha monitors in them, but you rarely see Yorkville. There's a reason for that. :D
 
:)

NS10s perhaps, not much else.

I dont see Event much.

I dont see too many monitors under $1k in general in commercial studios so thats not really a reliable guage. I see alot of mackie and genelec. I dont see blue sky or hafler (monitors). Occasionally I see dynaudio. That doesnt say anything about the quality of those monitors. Commercial studios generally have an agenda in what equipment they show to the public. They wouldnt be caught dead touting good gear thats in the under $1k category. They desparately cling to the notion that +$1k = pro and -$1k=sumer. My point is in the -$1k category you see every company well represented on ebay. I have yet to ever see a pair of YSM1s there.
 
ns10s are crap, that is the concenscious, just cause people use them doesn't mean they're good. Old habbits die hard.
 
JuSumPilgrim said:
How many yorkville ysm1s have you seen on ebay?
None.
Theres a reason for that.
You find behringer, event, tannoy, krk, M-audio, and others on ebay all the time.
Theres a reason for that.
You can almost guage the quality of a given product by how many you find on ebay.
Click to expand...

I think the fact that Yorkville monitors aren't carried by the major players in the US music equip biz (sam ash, guitar center, musicians' friend, etc) has more to do with it than the quality of the monitors themselves...the other monitors that you mention seem to be much more widely distributed and readily available to the average consumer

your linking of quality to ebay is ridiculous, in my opinion....ebay right now has 25 SM57s listed - does that mean that they're crap? nope......it just means that they are a whole heck of alot of them out there and that they are a proven seller...
 
Yorkville YSM-!P's are great monitors for under $500 bucks, in fact, to get a better sounding set one has to spend about 3 tmes as much.....

I actually prefer the Yorkies over the Mackie 824's myself....they have a flatter response and, not such an exaggerated bottom-end...

A great product....

KEV
 
JuSumPilgrim said:
Commercial studios..... desparately cling to the notion that +$1k = pro and -$1k=sumer.
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It's not some desperate and vain delusion like you suggest. At least for speakers, it's a real matter of the economics of achieving quality. And $1000 is probably a reasonable threshold for separating consumer performance from low end professional performance. When I say "consumer performance" I mean that the quality and level of performance are in the same league as consumer products even though they are designed to meet certain professional criteria.

Quality designs, components and implementations are expensive – especially when it comes to loudspeakers since the task of converting electrical energy to mechanical energy and finally to acoustic energy is so difficult. I also have a general price threshold that helps me make decisions about the speakers I build – mostly to decide whether I should build one or not. If someone approaches me with say $1000 for a set of monitors, I usually just direct them to a commercial product in this price range. For this amount of money commercial designs benefit from the economies of scale and it's difficult for me to compete and still be worth my effort. Now when you're talking $1500 and up, then I can compete and most often provide a much better speaker for the money compared to commercial designs. The reason for this difference is because, like I said, it costs a certain amount of money to achieve a certain goal. And unless you completely revolutionize the way that thing is done, you work under the same basic rules as everyone else.

Anyone who wants to believe that their Yorkvilles or Events are not much different from Dynaudio or Quested they can go right ahead. But that is a real delusion.

Now, if you want to argue that the quality of a Mackie HR824 or Genelec 1031A is not worth their price, then we might find some agreement.:)

barefoot
 
Re: Re: A thought about monitors

pratt said:


I think the fact that Yorkville monitors aren't carried by the major players in the US music equip biz (sam ash, guitar center, musicians' friend, etc) has more to do with it than the quality of the monitors themselves...the other monitors that you mention seem to be much more widely distributed and readily available to the average consumer

your linking of quality to ebay is ridiculous, in my opinion....ebay right now has 25 SM57s listed - does that mean that they're crap? nope......it just means that they are a whole heck of alot of them out there and that they are a proven seller...
Click to expand...

Youre a genius. :rolleyes:

I said its almost a guage.

The fact that yorkville is not carried by most major retailers does have something to do with it but it remains hugely popular with those in the know a decade after they were introduced. We'll see if the event PS series will still be around in a decade. Also the fact that sam ash and co dont carry it would actually be a point in its favor indicating a level of quality. The big retailers are mostly shit factories.
I say all this as one who had the yorks over a year ago when my room was set up differently. They seemed too dull at that point bec I had carpet everywhere, diffusors and too much sonex on the walls. I ended up using a pair of events for the next year and a half with mixed results. They can be very trickey long after youve learned them. I rearranged by space recently and took down some of the sonex and pulled the haflers I was using further away from the walls and the sound opened up hugely. Ive been running through a bunch of monitors here for the last couple of months so I tried the yorkvilles again (passives with a P1500) and the dif bet then and now is unreal. I was also using a dif amp back then.

Barefoot, I hear what youre saying about economies of scale and the basic cost of design and production for a truly prof monitor but room design and placement is as important a factor. I had the mackies here for a little while and they sounded bad. Too much bottom and low mid. When I adjusted the setting for less bottom they didnt seem to offer much more than I would get with the yorks or haflers for several hundred less. Dynaudios are wonderful in the right room (in the wrong room too :) ) but again not worth the $$ if your room was not designed from the ground up for mixing.
Not everything under $1k is in the same category. Like the +$1k range there are vast dif in quality from one pair of monitors to the next.
 
Re: Re: Re: A thought about monitors

JuSumPilgrim said:
...I hear what youre saying about economies of scale and the basic cost of design and production for a truly prof monitor but room design and placement is as important a factor....
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Yes, if the room is bad it can wash out many of the benefits of better monitors. Then the equations just become:

Good Monitors + Bad Room = shit
or
Bad Monitors + Bad Room = 2*shit

Either way you're left with shit.

But the lesson here is not skimp on the monitors. The lesson is improve the room. The speakers are the source of the sound. Improving the room fixes problems created by the room, and is a must. But fixing the room can't fix problems created by the source. Remember that Bad Monitors plus Good Room also still equals shit.

barefoot
 
I dont think your equation holds up. You can improve your room all you want but I still dont think a room in a house that has parallel walls at 90 degree angles will ever sound like a room that was acoustically desgined for sound from day 1 and has nothing parallel. Ive listened to the same monitors in both and the dif is profound although the monitors flaws (event) were apparent in both.
I think the best speakers around are made to sound great in acoustically great rooms, they take a huge hit in small rooms with 8 foot ceilings and roughly parallel walls. If you could put a dollar amount on it I would say they lose about half their value.
 
JuSumPilgrim said:
...I think the best speakers around are made to sound great in acoustically great rooms, they take a huge hit in small rooms with 8 foot ceilings and roughly parallel walls. If you could put a dollar amount on it I would say they lose about half their value....
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Yes, but you don’t make much of a point because all speakers will sound their best in a great room. If they don’t, then they have either been tailor made to solve the problems of a particular room, or they're just playing tricks to give the impression to ignorant ears that one can get something for nothing.

And I disagree about the necessity of such a big hit in performance in smaller rooms. The speakers I build have outstanding linearity (low distortion and wide dynamic range) especially in the midrange and high frequencies. Unless you’re mixing in a closet the mid and high frequency performance of most any average size room can, with effort, be brought up to world class standards. Good low frequency performance in a normal room is, of course, quite difficult to achieve.

So, it’s possible for even the average home recor to retain a large portion of the benefits of high performance monitors.

barefoot
 
JuSumPilgrim said:
How many yorkville ysm1s have you seen on ebay?

None. Theres a reason for that.

You find behringer, event, tannoy, krk, M-audio, and others on ebay all the time.

Theres a reason for that.

You can almost guage the quality of a given product by how many you find on ebay.
Click to expand...

Why start a thread that puts down Behringer, Event, Tannoy and M-Audio. This is homerecording.com and not a pro audio forum, and some people have invested real money in some of those monitors. "You can guage the quality by how many you find on Ebay" is telling everyone who bought these monitors that their monitors are not good quality. Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't....I'm not sure you are qualified to say. When's the last time you had your hearing checked ? :p

I would have more respect for your thread if it was called " Hey people, your monitors are shit".
 
I'll say it!

Hey people, your monitors are shit!

I've said it countless times, and I'll say it countless times more. Monitors are the weakest link in your audio chain and are almost certainly lying to you in many ways. If your monitors aren't, in fact or principle, the most expensive single pieces of equipment in your signal path, then they probably deserve to be called shit.

barefoot
 
barefoot said:
Yes, but you don’t make much of a point because all speakers will sound their best in a great room. If they don’t, then they have either been tailor made to solve the problems of a particular room, or they're just playing tricks to give the impression to ignorant ears that one can get something for nothing.

And I disagree about the necessity of such a big hit in performance in smaller rooms. The speakers I build have outstanding linearity (low distortion and wide dynamic range) especially in the midrange and high frequencies. Unless you’re mixing in a closet the mid and high frequency performance of most any average size room can, with effort, be brought up to world class standards. Good low frequency performance in a normal room is, of course, quite difficult to achieve.

So, it’s possible for even the average home recor to retain a large portion of the benefits of high performance monitors.

barefoot
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Most nearfields in the $500 range address the small room issue bec they are generally small and put out less bass. Most nearfields in the +$1k range like mackie have alot of bottom and dont work well in small rooms.

WideAwake, Im not bashing all those monitors. Im at a point in my mixing where Im appraising things differently. A decent mix is possible on most monitors once you know them. A decent mix meaning a professional one (not on all monitors). A great mix is rarely possible on monitors that are not well represented in a given frequency. For instance event has a big hole bet 350-800 or so. Tannoy has no top end and not much going on below 180. Other speakers have flaws which I wont get into here but suffice it to say that some of the most popular are the most flawed. That was my point.

Again I meant no offense to your choices and as has been said endlessly, a good mix (a mix with a decent balance) is possible on most monitors out there. The question of getting mixes which are "Great" becomes one of how good am I at gauging the flaws and how tight that range, how accurately I know the flaws. So if Im hearing a 5dB hype around 250Hz on a behringer speaker does that mean there will be 5dB hype in the real world or 2dB or 9dB. The problem then becomes, lets say I know theres supposed to be a 5dB hype there for it to translate, what does that do to my tonal perspective? You know that often cutting around 250Hz can make a mix sound alot more open, without having to boost anything. Do I boost the top end to get that sense of space? Do I cut some at 500Hz to get more space? But everything I hear on behringer has a bottom heavy boominess, but is that a mid bottom boom around 250Hz or a low mid boom around 500Hz. Big difference there. Perhaps Im cutting the thickness out of the mix if I cut at 500, perhaps that will solve the problem. Who knows? My point is when it comes to a great mix and KNOWING your speakers intimately, that knowing must be able to translate into very fine EQ decisions in all the frequencies. 3dB too hot around 5Khz can distort sibilance and make cymbals harsh, perhaps the monitors youre using need more at 8 or 9Khz and not 5. Big difference there.

The calculations are endless and the better the monitor the fewer the calculations and the more linear a picture you get.
 
JuSumPilgrim said:
....Most nearfields in the $500 range address the small room issue bec they are generally small and put out less bass. Most nearfields in the +$1k range like mackie have alot of bottom and dont work well in small rooms....
Click to expand...
That's definitely not a correct statement.

What about the Dynaudio BM6 ($1500), BM6A ($2000) or the Quested VS2205 ($3000). All of these have limited low frequency extension; yet will completely shame any Yorkville, Event, Mackie, or similar monitor you care to put them up against. Low frequency extension is far from the only factor that dictates quality or price.

Anyhow, even for a small room, I would always choose a high performance speaker with greater bass output over a small crap speaker. The bass can always be cut, if that’s what is really needed. The small crap speaker can't be made to sound any better.

barefoot
 
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Low freq extension does not dictate price, it just so happens that MOST monitors in the above $1k range have more low end bec the assumption is that the room is acoustically designed to deal with low end. The dynaudios may be an exception. Again the key word here is MOST.

No offense but I dont think your perspective is very relevant to this thread as its not about the GREATEST monitors ever created. Its about the best in the UNDER $1k range. Thats why I said, take a look on ebay and youll find event, tannoy and behringer. I didnt say youd find alot of quested or dynaudio. It is my considered opinion, having extensively worked with many of the $500 monitors that yorkville is probably the best of the bunch.
 
JuSumPilgrim said:
No offense but I dont think your perspective is very relevant to this thread as its not about the GREATEST monitors ever created. Its about the best in the UNDER $1k range.
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If you recall, I started off by addressing your statement:

“Commercial studios generally have an agenda in what equipment they show to the public. They wouldnt be caught dead touting good gear thats in the under $1k category. They desparately cling to the notion that +$1k = pro and -$1k=sumer.”

The only way I can find to interpret this statement is that you think professional studios do not consider using lower priced monitors of comparable quality because they need to worry about appearances. In other words, there are under $1k monitors which are of comparable quality to over $1k monitors, but studios don't use them because their customers might frown upon it. That is how I interpreted your statement. And my argument >>with respect to this statement you made<< is that there is in general a significant difference between these two classes of monitors - the most notable exception being the Mackies, which I personally don't think are very good.

barefoot
 
YES, we are only talking about under $1K monitors here - not top range pro sets.....in the $3-5,000 category...

and for $500 bucks the YSM-1P's are definitely the best of the bunch - but nobody is saying that they are better than the Dynaudio BM6 series, etc.....

Although for only $450 USD, the Yorkies DO sound better than the Behringers, M-Audio's, Tannoys, Events and I reckon as good as the Mackies, which are far more expensive :-)

*subjectively speaking* - of course :-)

KEV
 
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