Nate74
HR4FREBR
After almost a year of thinking, talking and researching, I finally replaced my 6 year old HR824s. My main complaint (as others frequently have said) with the HR824s is that I've had consistent trouble with the clarity of the bass and often times the kick.
I opted for 6.5" drivers this time around in the belief that A) I don't mix super bass heavy stuff where I want to "feel" the bass and B) it might help minimize the interaction of the room a bit. While my room is heavily treated with 703 bass traps, it’s still a bedroom and must be messing with frequencies in some way.
I had a chance to borrow some Dynaudio 5As a few weeks back and while they were certainly more defined than my HR824s, for some reason they just didn't sit right to my ears, so I took them off my short list.
I mustered some courage and decided to roll the dice at the local GuiTarget. I was hoping to hear:
Tannoy Reveal 6Ds
KRK V6 MkII
Adam A7
Event ASP6
Of those, the only thing GC had was the Events. The "audio professional" hooked them up for me and immediately started blasting some house/hip-hop/dance mix at a volume no one could possibly mix at. I'm not sure what about my appearance that day (BB King t-shirt, handful of blues and rock CDs, glasses, thinning hair, etc.) made him think that was what I'd want to hear but after about 30 seconds of it, I requested we use one of my CDs and turn down to a more listenable volume.
I listened to a few cuts off Corey Steven's Road To Zen and a couple mixes I recently did on my Mackies, still in the blues/rock vein. Maybe it was because my ears were still recovering from the barrage of 808 hits I'd just been subjected to, but with these tracks, the bass seemed almost non-present on the Events.
I asked about the KRK V6s but was told that the new VXTs had replaced them. I had run across only two reviews of the VXTs but both had been fairly positive so I decided to try them out.
Let me just say, I think they look horrible; like toys to my eye. All plastic, the yellow drivers look very odd to me, and their rounded shape just looks silly. Of course none of those things are why you buy monitors so I gave them a good listen. They seemed to have a more defined bass sound than the ASPs did. Not only did the bass seem louder, the overall sound seemed more defined in that range. I could hear things in the bass line, like a flubbed note that didn’t really stand out on the ASPs or my Mackies. It's me playing the bass part and I'm all too aware of how that particular passage has always been difficult for me to play cleanly.
For giggles I tried the Rockit 6s, just to have a third point of comparison. They reminded me alot of my old passive YSM1s, in that I couldn't hear anything clearly. Though, by this point in my experience I was quite certain my ears were starting to lie to me and that their monitor room was not designed for monitors. Another interesting "sales tactic" was that the sales guy left two instructional videos playing in the room while I was listening to the monitors...
After about 30 minutes I was even more unsure than before I'd walked in, but I got the sales guy to agree to give me 15 days to exchange the VXTs for anything else they had in the store without having to pay their restock charge.
When I got them home and setup, the first thing I did was play a complete Buddy Guy (Heavy Love) CD through them. I just sat and listened to them. Next, I pulled up some of the recent mixes I'd done for my blues project, the same ones I'd had with me at GC. I immediately found myself wanting to tighten up the bass sound with a low cut and some additional compression. On the second song I pulled up though, the bass sounded distant and seemed to lack bottom end. Previously on the HR824s, both mixes had seemed to be about the same as far as bass balance and clarity.
Over the course of a week, I remixed all 12 tracks from that project as well as three demo cuts from an acoustic alt/rock project I'm in. Each mix seemed to translate much more as expected than they had when originally mixed on the Mackies.
At this point I'm about 90% sure I will be keeping the VXTs which is good since my 15 days are almost up.
I would have really liked 15 days with each of the sets on my list, but at this point I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with. I don't know if it's because they're really that good, or if it's just such an improvement over the 824s. Maybe anything off my list would have been an improvement, maybe something else would have been even better... but all in all, I think I'm a fan of the VXTs, I just wish they didn't look so damn cheap.
I opted for 6.5" drivers this time around in the belief that A) I don't mix super bass heavy stuff where I want to "feel" the bass and B) it might help minimize the interaction of the room a bit. While my room is heavily treated with 703 bass traps, it’s still a bedroom and must be messing with frequencies in some way.
I had a chance to borrow some Dynaudio 5As a few weeks back and while they were certainly more defined than my HR824s, for some reason they just didn't sit right to my ears, so I took them off my short list.
I mustered some courage and decided to roll the dice at the local GuiTarget. I was hoping to hear:
Tannoy Reveal 6Ds
KRK V6 MkII
Adam A7
Event ASP6
Of those, the only thing GC had was the Events. The "audio professional" hooked them up for me and immediately started blasting some house/hip-hop/dance mix at a volume no one could possibly mix at. I'm not sure what about my appearance that day (BB King t-shirt, handful of blues and rock CDs, glasses, thinning hair, etc.) made him think that was what I'd want to hear but after about 30 seconds of it, I requested we use one of my CDs and turn down to a more listenable volume.
I listened to a few cuts off Corey Steven's Road To Zen and a couple mixes I recently did on my Mackies, still in the blues/rock vein. Maybe it was because my ears were still recovering from the barrage of 808 hits I'd just been subjected to, but with these tracks, the bass seemed almost non-present on the Events.
I asked about the KRK V6s but was told that the new VXTs had replaced them. I had run across only two reviews of the VXTs but both had been fairly positive so I decided to try them out.
Let me just say, I think they look horrible; like toys to my eye. All plastic, the yellow drivers look very odd to me, and their rounded shape just looks silly. Of course none of those things are why you buy monitors so I gave them a good listen. They seemed to have a more defined bass sound than the ASPs did. Not only did the bass seem louder, the overall sound seemed more defined in that range. I could hear things in the bass line, like a flubbed note that didn’t really stand out on the ASPs or my Mackies. It's me playing the bass part and I'm all too aware of how that particular passage has always been difficult for me to play cleanly.
For giggles I tried the Rockit 6s, just to have a third point of comparison. They reminded me alot of my old passive YSM1s, in that I couldn't hear anything clearly. Though, by this point in my experience I was quite certain my ears were starting to lie to me and that their monitor room was not designed for monitors. Another interesting "sales tactic" was that the sales guy left two instructional videos playing in the room while I was listening to the monitors...
After about 30 minutes I was even more unsure than before I'd walked in, but I got the sales guy to agree to give me 15 days to exchange the VXTs for anything else they had in the store without having to pay their restock charge.
When I got them home and setup, the first thing I did was play a complete Buddy Guy (Heavy Love) CD through them. I just sat and listened to them. Next, I pulled up some of the recent mixes I'd done for my blues project, the same ones I'd had with me at GC. I immediately found myself wanting to tighten up the bass sound with a low cut and some additional compression. On the second song I pulled up though, the bass sounded distant and seemed to lack bottom end. Previously on the HR824s, both mixes had seemed to be about the same as far as bass balance and clarity.
Over the course of a week, I remixed all 12 tracks from that project as well as three demo cuts from an acoustic alt/rock project I'm in. Each mix seemed to translate much more as expected than they had when originally mixed on the Mackies.
At this point I'm about 90% sure I will be keeping the VXTs which is good since my 15 days are almost up.
I would have really liked 15 days with each of the sets on my list, but at this point I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with. I don't know if it's because they're really that good, or if it's just such an improvement over the 824s. Maybe anything off my list would have been an improvement, maybe something else would have been even better... but all in all, I think I'm a fan of the VXTs, I just wish they didn't look so damn cheap.
