active or passive monitors?

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oh_the_blood

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i know active monitors are powered, but why do they sell passive?
what are the difference between the two, and which would be best for a foxtex vf80ex for mixing?
 
A powered monitor is really a passive monitor but with an internal amplifier built in!.. So there are no speaker cables.. Just a line level signal (maybe coming straight from your mixer desk) feeding the monitor. Require AC power.

Passive monitors can be fed from a single amplifier. From a cost point of view, they make a lot of sense. You still have the HF and LF drivers in there, only an internal passive crossover drives the two speakers for you. No external crossovers here, just plug in and go!.. The only draw back is lack of flexibility with cross over adjustment (like you have in more pro active systems).
 
If it makes a difference...

If given a choice between an active or passive pair of any particular model (under a few $k anyway...) I tend to go with the passives and a NICE amp, as opposed to the usually less-than-"worthy" amps that are stuffed into most budget passives.
 
At what level do amps start becoming nice? Servos being the cheapest and Hafler being as high up as most of us are aware of.
 
I would say that Hafler at least touches the "nice" threshold... TransNova being "nicer" than the TA series.

There's a lot to choose from... Me? I'm a Bryston guy... Even used (they come with a 20-year warranty, so finding used ones with several years left is pretty common). "Audiophile" (I hate buzzwords - even when they're the truth) grade, hand assembled, HOT running (class A, A/B), headroom for days.

Hooking one up to some decent speakers is an ear-opening experience - If you hook up both amps and then one channel to one amp at a time.

Before my old Bryston came in, I was "between amps" for a couple weeks. I was using an old Kenwood (the expensive, nice, "audiophile" grade Kenwood) amp until the Bryston arrived. I thought it sounded "okay" until I hooked up one chanel on the Bryston...

Everything was so skewed sounding... It sounded like I had a woofer and a tweeter on the right (Bryston) and a mid driver on the left (Kenwood). Flipping back-and-forth on the L/R was really something...

Moral of the story - Don't skimp on your monitoring chain. You can't tweak what you can't hear.
 
so what is the cheapest route to go for a beginner like me so i can start mixing and mastering to perfection using monitors?
 
It might be a good idea for you to give us a dollar amount you could comfortably spend. Im sure these guys have noticed your age...15. cheap for us might be WAY over the top for you. Give us a budget and it will make it easier for us all to give you some advice.
 
Thanks John ... I hear what you're saying. I'm years and years off 'great' monitoring yet. I'm happy with my Alesis M1As ... but mostly just because I scored at a peanuts price. I'll stick with them until I'm read financially to make a big step up. I get the feeling that the stereo imaging is good but there is some detail higher up that I'm missing out on. I stuck socks in the bass ports to level the 'hifi' sound out a bit too!!
 
Hey blood, I live in Denver as well. It's pretty tricky trying to find decent prices on a monitoring chain around here, and it's damn near impossible to find used monitors. I would suggest hitting one of the Music Go Round stores and seeing if you can find a power amp (100 watts, just a small one by Alesis or what-not) for around a hundred bucks, and then order the Behringer passives off of Musician's Friend for $139 (I think that's what they sell them for now). That's probably as cheap as you'll be able to go. The benefit of going this route is that you can start off with the amp, and (although it's far from ideal) you'll be able to use whatever speakers you've got lying around until you get your monitors.
 
well i already have a power amp, its really old, like montgomery wards old, that powers my record player and speakers.
could i find a power amp at a pawn shop? because i went there and they had tonssss, or are those for totally different speakers?

yea denver does kinda suck, but i always goto Gravity Music Gear on federal, but now since they are on ebay, they never have anything good laying around.
 
If it's got inputs that you can run your mixer to, then it would theoretically work (maybe, kind of?) but I don't think many of those stereo amps work that way. For power amp suggestions, try running some searches on Ebay for a Hafler TA1600, Alesis RA-100 (I think that's it...it's what I was able to find at M.G.R. for 99 bucks), or just any other 100 watt amp that's actually designed for this purpose. Everybody on here is right when they say that the better your monitoring chain is, the better your recordings will be. Case in point--I haven't been able to pick up my monitors yet (have to wait till Tuesday :mad: ), and I'm "mixing" out of some stereo speakers right now. My recordings sound like a dog took a giant crap on the CD. It's amazing what you think you're hearing when you're making these adjustments, only to put the CD in your car stereo and hear complete vomit. Right now, I'm wishing I had listened to everybody here before I went out and bought 9 microphones, but no decent monitors.
 
haha damn, off to the pawn shop i go, do you have any recordings up?
 
Nope, not yet. I'm proud of the songs, but they sound like distorted farts. They'll be up in about a week or so, once they're closer to being mixed right.
 
nice nice, the second i get my stuff, im locking myself in my room and not coming out in days.. what kind of stuff do you have?

i just ordered a fostex vf80 ex and a studio projects b1
 
My monitoring chain cost me around £80 ($150).

£50 for a used (although it seemed brand new when I got it) Yamaha natural sound amp. It's a hi-fi unit but there is a direct through switch which bypasses all of the unecessary circuitry (eq etc) so it doesn't colour things too much.

£30 for a pair of IMF super compact 2 monitors. These were made in the 70's in High Wycombe, England and I love them.

I don't claim that this is an excellent monitoring chain but I reckon it's better than a lot of the crappy lower end boxes out there that would still set you back 2 or 3 times what I paid for this lot.

My mixes are transferring much better on this set up than they did on my Event 20/20s anyway.
 
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