Good Monitors = Good Mixes

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ok...to all the monitor experts!

i have a pair of monitors coming to me...and i want to know whats going to be best for what I am doing. i produce urban/pop music.

I am contemplating the mackies or the v8's, but i want to make sure what i should get...so which ones...or are there others for the same or less price range that will do the trick?

help would be graciosuly accepted!
 
I preferred the KRK V8s over the Mackies, but it amounts to personal preference. Monitor selection is VERY subjective.
 
Monitor selection

Monitor selection is not subjective! Is 2+2=4 subjective?

It's not what your ears tell you, how do you know that they are trained properly. What type of reference recordings do you listen to? How do you know what recordings were actually done well and which ones just sound good on YOUR system. What about your room? What is your power amp doing to your sound before it sends that power to your speakers.

SPECS! If they are true specs they will always tell the truth. First and foremost, FLAT Frequency response. Next thing to look for is phase response, which is basically the time alignment between the tweeter and the woofer.

Proper phase creates proper imaging. Proper frequency response creates a proper representation of the engineers eq settings and mic choice. The two combined, both being at a high spec, along with other specs like wide dispersion, low distortion levels,and high peak power handling, can lead you to a set of monitors that won't lie to you.

Then and only then will you truly be able to determine what sounds good, and what just sounds good to most people. Most recordings that people think sound descent, really suck. They are made on a budget, no attention to proper recording techniques, and mixed on car speakers. They sound good for the masses with the masses jam boxes. I am talking about speakers that can actually fool you into believeing that you are truly at a concert, as apposed to listening to a couple boxes. What is all the love with fake, boomy bass that only hits hard at one frequency and resonates the whole cabinet. That's what your cheaper "monitors" do.


MONITORS SHOULD BE TRANSPARENT. Transparency is not subjective. You can either tell you are listening to speakers or you can't. Either the sky is blue or it's not. A blind person may disagree, but does his opinion really matter in the world of colors? Then either does a deaf mans opinions in the world of sound.

Of course room placement is important when you are dealing with early and late reflections, but frequency response should not vary much if your have speaker is worth a darn and has fairly wide dispersion, especially below 500Hz, since sound starts to become omnidirectional below that frequency.

With a FAST computer, a descent sound card at 24 bit 96kHz, a good condenser mic, a good power amp; like a crown MacroReference, and an awesome set of monitors like the Timepiece 2.0's, a person can make a truly awesome recording and that is all that a person truly needs to make excellent recordings. You don't need every effects box or a million different mics or the best mixer. You don't even need a mixer,just a nice mic pre-amp. Except for a descent space to record in and , well..... something worth recording.
 
Re: Monitor selection

jfreeman373 said:
Monitor selection is not subjective!
Click to expand...
What the hell are you babbling about????

Of course it's subjective.... how do explain the use of monitors like NS-10s and at the same time, Meyer HD-1s....

Monitors are tools for you to work with, and you have to use the tool that suits YOUR ears....

Naturally, this presumes that you already have an experienced ear that can actually differentiate good sound........

Many people prefer Mackies to KRK V8s... I don't.... the V8s give me the sonic info *I* need to make a good mixing decision. Others can make that sonic decision using Mackies, or Tannoys, or Genelecs or Westlakes or even crappy NS-10s...

But don't give me this shit about the choice of monitor not being subjective -- every engineer's ears hear differently and each engineer needs to find the monitor he/she is comfortable working with..........

That should be self-evident.........!
 
If a particular monitor has a 3dB increase at 500Hz and another monitor has a 3dB dip at 500Hz, how can you make a proper decision to either give your a track a boost or reduction at that frequency. How can you recognize good sound in those conditions? YOU CAN'T! Both examples are lieing to you. The only way you can make a proper decision is with a flat frequency response. I'm sorry if the truth offends you into cursing, but your mixing probably does the same.

Monitors should be an analytical tool, not an ego boost to your music that says, heh, "That sounds awesome! look what I have created, I really know how to mix don't I!" If you were to boost the 500 hz on my previous example, when you played that same track on the pair of speakers that already had a 3dB increase at 500 Hz, It would sound terrible for the fact that you would now have a 6dB total increase from a sum of the gain and the speaker's non-linearity. Which would then tend to sound harsh and also cause the speaker to distort more easily at the frequency, more than the other frequencies in your track and also cause the voice coil to heat more, and depending on the volume, be much easier to potentionally blow a driver. Not withstanding the compression factor that such settings could cause your amplifier to go into, thus causing more non-linearity.

But maybe on some speakers a person can't tell a drastic 6 dB increase or decrease because their response is even more non-linear than that. Which would be perfectly understandable.
 
You're arguing in circles.... :rolleyes:

NO monitor gives you flat response... and even if it did, the room (even the best room) won't give you flat response....

So what that means is an engineer has to become familiar with their choice of monitors in the environment they're working in.... it's calling "learning how to translate mixes on the monitors you do use"....

How difficult a job it that is, is a function of how well those monitors reproduce AND how well those monitors suit your ears.

Period.
 
jfreeman373 said:
I'm sorry if the truth offends you into cursing, but your mixing probably does the same.
Monitors should be an analytical tool, not an ego boost to your music that says, heh, "That sounds awesome! look what I have created, I really know how to mix don't I!"
Click to expand...
:rolleyes:
 
Hahahahahaha...

That means there are only one right set of ears! Bummer for the rest of us!

Flat frequency response....gimme a freakin break. I guess you have to work at guitarcenter to truely understand buzz words.

Oops, I fed a troll :(

Slackmaster 2000
 
No, it dosn't mean their is only one right set of ears, it means that you need a proper reference to go by, a standard that is as accurate as possible. Yes you can "translate your mix" as Blue Bear said. But why should you have to? The idea of a near field monitor, is that it is close to you, so as to minimize room interference as much as possible. The later in time a reflection occurs, the less subconscious effect it has of blurring back into the original source and smearing your sound stage. It is easier to translate your mix if you already know by looking at your specs and response graph that your speaker is already peaked up or dipped at a certain frequency, so that you do not overcompensate with your eq.

I hear the effects of such errors all the time.

Room interference should really be a non-issue if your room is set up right. Especially if your monitors have good dispersion as apposed to just one sweet spot.

Because... what does a room do? It reflects sound,... or it absorbs sound. If all frequencies are equal in volume, then shouldn't the reflections be equal in volume, unless they are absorbed?

That is why you don't want a dead room. BUt... I guess some people feel the need to plaster foam and egg crates all over the walls to absorb the sound, and leave the bass frequencies to run rampant because they CAN'T be absorbed, and in turn they now have a room that is worse than when they started. The proper thing to do is to create dispersion in the room and absorb ONLY the frequencies that are peaking in certain areas. Only then will a good monitor do you any good.

Now instead of every attacking the guy that has something intelligent to say, why dosn't someone say something intelligent rather than just smart.
 
jfreeman373 said:
The idea of a near field monitor, is that it is close to you, so as to minimize room interference as much as possible.
Click to expand...
This statement alone clearly shows your lack of an informed opinion........ the fact is, the room matters much more than is thought for nearfield monitoring. So much so, that the use of the term "flat" is a meaningless ideal -- there's simply no such thing.

No matter how good the room or the monitors, a certain amount of translation is required..... whether you want to call it that or not is your problem....

I'm guessing Boray taught you everything he knows.........! :rolleyes:
 
well I guess there is no such thing as absolute zero either, but we do attempt to get as close as possible in the world of science.

I guess the speed of light is also debateable, or wave interferance to create holograms, but... I do believe it was used in the theory of relativity to calculate the power of an atomic reaction. But we all know that nuclear weapons and reactors don't exist and the outcome of such a reaction is only theoretical.

I guess if you are talking about PERFECTLY flat, no we can't create it, but a variation of +/-6 dB is a hell of alot further way than +/- 1.5 dB which is more precise than the human ear that can only (on an AVERAGE untrained ear) notice a change in volume of 3dB or more. You probably don't even believe in phase cancellations either.

Of course anechoic chambers don't exist, where proper testing and measurements can be taken,within the specs of the analytical equipment of course, to prove proper responses of certain equipment.

And of course water is dry.

I never said the room dosn't matter, but if you start out with shit at the beginning of the sound chain (your instrument,mic, and medium) logic must dictate it can only get worse at the end.
 
Jfreeman: If there were one perfect set of speakers out there then your argument would be valid. The problem is that each speaker is imperfect, and our only option is to choose a speaker with a set of imperfections we can work with, and that’s a personal decision.
The problem is not weather the sky is blue or not… we cannot reproduce the acoustic ‘blue sky.’ So if my sky has a hint of green, and yours red, does that make either one of us wrong?

Anyway, the more money, time and research you put into your monitors and room the closer you will get to the ideal transparent listening environment. But IMO there is a point that is ‘good enough’ for making a decent mix. Yeah, more transparent is better but a 10 billion dollar listening environment that is +/- .00002 db from 20hz to 20Khz isn’t going to make a cheap mic sound nice or a noisy compressor quiet. It’s a signal CHAIN from the source to the monitors to the media the music is printed on, and it’s only going to sound as good as the weakest link.


But I am still very much a newbie, so what the heck do I know?
 
I think there's something both of you you are overlooking:

Let's assume monitor A has a +3db peak at 500 hz.

Now let's assume monitor B has a -3db dip at the same 500 hz.

Now let's assume mixing engineer A has a -3db dip in his hearing (perhaps he lives near a construction site where most of the machinery pumps out unusually large 500 hz sound waves causing ear fatigue), or he just really likes that frequency and has a tendency to exaggerate it too much in his mixes. :D Let's also assume mixing engineer B hears 500 hz much better than the average person, and subsequently cuts it almost all the time on everything he mixes.

Does anyone see where I'm going with this? :D

Flat playback does not exist any more than perfectly flat hearing.
 
Why would he cut it? If he hears a peak at 500hz all his life, wouldn't he miss it if he cut it?
 
I think the answer might have more to do with past experiences with speakers than with hearing. I have a somewhat harsh set of speakers I am using right now, they are Klipsch bookshelf speakers with a horn tweeter. When I hear other speakers, my Klipsch are automatically my reference point, because they are what I am used to and listen to every day. Because of my ‘conditioning’ I find most speakers are a little soft, lack presence and have weak imaging.

We should probably get used to listening to the most accurate, flat, transparent speakers we can get our hands on… but if we are used to something a little colored, and we can translate it into a good mix, then does it really matter?

I think it’s probably more important to have speakers that you are used to, that reveal all the detail, that have good imaging and that doesn’t fatigue the ear. Chasing perfect freq. Response is not flawed thinking IMO, but not a guarantee to perfect mixes either.


But again, I'm a newbie, so ill shut up.
 
Maybe I was not clear on what I meant. Lets say that your ears heard a peak at 500 hz, and my ears did not... If we both listened to a perfect mix on a perfect system you and I are going to agree its perfect, right? Your not going to say ohh, there is a peak at 500hz, are you? No. You hear the 500hz boost with everything, so its normal to you. Your used to it. You don’t notice it.

Of course there is no 'perfect setup' like I said above... but if there was, it would be perfect to any ears (perfect meaning 100% transparent, 'you are there' sounding.)


I think Blue Bear said it right.
NO monitor gives you flat response... and even if it did, the room (even the best room) won't give you flat response....
So what that means is an engineer has to become familiar with their choice of monitors in the environment they're working in.... it's calling "learning how to translate mixes on the monitors you do use"....
Click to expand...

I guess something like that can be applied to ears also :) Perfectly flat ears would look funny anyway.

Anyway, I don’t know what you meant by oh my god, but if I said anything wrong or stupid, let me know. I am open to being wrong and to learning.
 
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