My conclusion would be this...
If you choose well designed "high end" Hi-Fi speakers, then yes, they are likely to be accurate enough for mixing. However, experience has shown me that many of the young members here who choose to use Hi-Fi speakers end up using low cost "junk" speakers left over from their teen years. I believe that many serious monitor designers choose better performing components, as a general rule, with more focus on accuracy. While designers of home theater systems and Hi-Fi systems are generally more driven by budget minded consumers. Cheap stuff sells faster.
My point was that if you tell everyone that they can use any speaker they want, some will end up using their laptop speakers. Is that the direction you want this forum to go?
I certainly don't want this forum to go in the direction of supporting false myths or in supporting things based upon how they're marketed instead of how they work.
As far as what Sound On Sound has to say, they sum it up fine right in their thesis at the outset:
SOS Article said:
"Can I use my hi-fi speakers as nearfield monitors?" It's a question often asked of Sound On Sound, but it's hard to answer, unless you're the kind of person that's satisfied with the reply 'it depends'...Even at the end of this two-part feature the answer is likely to be a shade of grey rather than black or white.
I sold loudspeakers - everything from home bookshelves to studio reference monitors - for many years, and worked with many manufacturers, and here is how loudspeakers (and practically everything else in this world) are typically designed: a manufacturer decides they need a product to fit a certain customer price range at a certain profit margin range, based upon what they perceive to be a market opportunity. Then they go out and either build their own components or - most often - find OEM components to outsource that will allow them to build such a product. They usually try to pick the best components they can for the budget, but often times decisions are made based upon supplier availability more than they are absolute quality of component. They then try to build the best system they can within the R&D budget they have and the time-to-market they have been given; both of which often place constraints upon the nature of the final product as well. Often times the identical components and design ideas are used in both monitors and home speakers for these very reasons.
Sometimes they wind up with a great product, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they'll make something that'll work for your ears, sometimes it won't. This is all equally true for home stereo speakers and studio monitors. Either way, their marketing department will tell you what you want to hear depending on whether they decide to market it as a home theater speaker or a studio monitor.
There is no more "hype" or flatness in one class of loudspeaker than there is an another. "Hype" takes money to engineer into a loudspeaker, you don't just "hype" a speaker and sell it for $100 and expect to make any money on it. Consumers like their stuff cheap. Cheap means not a lot of hype.
And it also take money to engineer "full and flat" into a studio monitor. You don't just make a full-range, flat "studio monitor" and sell it for $100 and expect to make any money on it. There's a whole lot of home recorders out there with cheap, crap "monitors" also.
You're right, there's a lot more to it than just the freq response specs; those were included just as a simple example roadmap. But the ultimate test is to listen. I can guarantee that given an equal number of "monitors" and "speakers" in a blind listening test, that you couldn't differentiate the two classes.
The most famous studio monitor in the world, the Yamaha NS-10, was not even a studio monitor. It was built by Yamaha as a home bookshelf speaker, and it was only when a few engineers started using them that Yamaha jumped on the bandwagon and "upgraded" it to the NS-10M ("M" standing for monitor.) And the NS-10 is just the opposite of hyped at the edges; it is, in fact, famous for it's midrange bump.
And don't even try to tell me that 90% of the "monitors" used out there are even close to flat. The vast majority used in home studios are nothing more than bookshelf speakers with a "studio monitor" plaque thrown on them, have an overall response as truncated and as uneven as those Polk Audios, and are harder for many ears to mix on than a decent pair of Altec Lansing computer speakers. Have you listened to most Polk Audio speakers? Calling those things "hyped" would be like calling Danny DeVito tall. And yet they are one of the most popular brands of home audio speakers out there.
Look, nobody's advocating mixing on crap speakers. But there's two problems; first there are are just as many crap speakers marketed as studio monitors as there are crap speakers marketed for home use, and second, one person's crap is another person's fertilizer - are you an NS-10 person or
a Tannoy Reveal person? There's not many people out there that like both.
Everyone has to pick what works for them. If they can't or don't know how to pick by using their ears instead of their eyes, then it doesn't really matter what they pick; they don't have the ears for this stuff anyway.
G.
), but if you're not mixing for THX soundtracks, hip hop or dance/trance, that may not be a killer.
thanks guys
