Monitor help!

[gecko zzed]

My sister loves listening to music, to the extent that she has speakers in every room of her house.

Many years ago, I was listening to a song in her lounge room, and it sounded pleasing. I went to the kitchen to make a coffee, and heard the rest of the song on the speakers there, and I grimaced at the sound. After having listened for a while as I made the coffee, I went back to the lounge room . . . and grimaced again. My ears had adjusted to the sound of the kitchen speakers, and now the lounge room ones sounded strange.

With this experience, I wandered from room to room, comparing speaker sounds. Each room change brought its own initial feeling of discomfort that faded. In isolation, each set sounded okay.

Were I to be ask which of all of her sets of speakers was better, I would not be able to make a choice. Each sounded weird straight after listening to another, but sounded okay after a while. I concluded that the brain plays an important role in psycho-acoustically filling in or removing frequencies.

Someone with more refined listening skills than me might be dominated less by this psycho-acoustic stuff. However, I remain as I am, and consequently remain largely unmoved by the rhetoric of loudspeaker claims.

 

[Z3NO]

Excellent reply Glen. Thanks for your constructive comments and criticisms. I have modified the article slightly to include some of your observations.
I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything you've pointed out, and I owe you an apology for initially misplacing you into the wrong category of 'listeners'...
Please bear in mind that my article was mainly intended at new, 'home studio' producers who find themselves in trouble choosing between a cheap KRK or a cheap Yamaha... They think monitors are supposed to be active and go as low as xyHz... and that's about it. In that respect they are faced with an abyss. I just wanted to somewhat ease off much pointless debate on those subjects and give a (small) insight into what other perspectives are worth taking into consideration.

I think with this sentence you pretty much hit the nail on the head: "most loudspeakers in both categories ("home" and "studio") are designed with the intention of having relatively extended and flat response" which is why i think it's important to break away from the consensus that all 'studio monitors' should be active, and why an ability to read specs properly is so important.
Too much room for exploitation (and error) is being allowed to manufacturers who market their (lesser quality) products as 'purpose built' for a particular application!

What I was referring to as coloration are in reality what trained ears would look at as artifacts, distortions and inaccurate response, but which even untrained ears can easily pick up and wrongly interpret (based pretty much on personal taste alone) as one speaker being better than the other. Another excellent point you make is that of bias. Once again I totally agree with you here, but it would require a lengthy article to itself to elaborate on this sadly, very influential subject.

What you refer to is a different subject altogether (beyond the scope of my article) and as I said before

As the quality increases (and prices exponentially) to reflect a more accurate, flat response, you will find these variations to be a lot less obvious and identifying your preference will be a much harder task.

A task which will be worth tackling for someone like yourself, where years of experience, trial and error will help develop a preference for one set of good speakers vs another set of equally good ones, but I think it will only add to the confusion of somebody just starting out as to them, these speakers will just simply 'sound amazing', so in my view it's a dilemma worth leaving for producers who have been in 'the game' a little while longer. At which point they will no longer need to refer to my articles.

All the best,
enzo

 

[The Cancers]

I don't think I've ever seen so civil an exchange on this board.
Congratulations on the maturity, gentlemen.

 

[philbagg]

Hey folks, I've posted a long article in the Ableton Forum just yesterday on this much debated topic.
If you have the time to read it in full, some of you might find it useful.

Best

remember that 3dB means a doubling or halving of the energy in a frequency, so not exactly a minor detail

I thought 10dB was a doubling/halving the volume in SPL? And 3dB was voltage/power?

Other than that I found it to be a very good read. Fair play.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

I concluded that the brain plays an important role in psycho-acoustically filling in or removing frequencies.

Someone with more refined listening skills than me might be dominated less by this psycho-acoustic stuff.

I think you hit the key factor right there, Mike. And frankly, while those with "more refined listening skills" may be less easy to trick than your average Joe iPod off the street, IME they are not immune to the same human factors (unless they are androids named "Data" .) Not only does context still play a huge roll - I'll bet you in a blind test I could trick even Bob Katz into selecting the speaker I wanted to if you gave me enough choices and testing time just by the order in which I conducted the test, but the wiring of the ear and brain itself matters. And that wiring is different for practically every one.

Another form of "trick" (unintentionally) are data like the Fletcher-Munson-style curves defining the response of "the human ear". What we forget (or often don't mention in the documentation with which they come), is that the F-M curves are *averages* amongst many test subjects. There was probably not one actual test subject that actually matched those actual curves precisely. And to make it worse, the actual accepted curves these days - the ISO 2003 curves - are derivative curves based upon the best attributes of older curve sets like F-M and others. The chances of any given human being matching those curves to within a couple of dB are probably about as good as that human winning that day's Powerball lottery.

With that in mind, it should become almost instantly recognizable that two people, even with trained ears, when actually physically tested, are almost never in complete agreement when it comes to optimal monitor selection. The best ears usually come closer, sure, but it's more unusual to have total agreement than it is to have at least some disagreement.

Excellent reply Glen. Thanks for your constructive comments and criticisms.
I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything you've pointed out, and I owe you an apology for initially misplacing you into the wrong category of 'listeners'...

No apology necessary. And thank you for the considered replies and understanding the spirit of discussion. The fact is, Z3NO, I also agree with most of the points you made. I just plead guilty to being one of those guys that's not all that persuaded by specifications and technical details - as correct as they may be - unless and until they can be demonstrated to having as definitive an effect in the real world as they imply.

Please bear in mind that my article was mainly intended at new, 'home studio' producers who find themselves in trouble choosing between a cheap KRK or a cheap Yamaha...

I understand completely. I even recommended it as a good post and worth adding to one's research on monitors. I just wanted to present the "non-technical" aspects of the decision as being important as well as an addendum to what you presented.

You're absolutely right, many newbs tend to take a spec sheet and over-simplify the meaning of what the see, and that if it says a response of DC-100k, that doesn't necessarily mean what it seems to at first blush . This (and many other reasons) is why I like putting the emphasis on "what do you hear?"

Welcome to the board, BTW .

G.

 

[Z3NO]

I just plead guilty to being one of those guys that's not all that persuaded by specifications and technical details

I totally hear you, but you got to learn to walk before you can run, right?
It's my intention to expand on the subjects I've covered in future articles, but I just wanted to ease in with something that's easy to read and understand. After reading through yet another post with replies consisting of nothing other than personal brand favourites, I felt it appropriate not to barge my way in with topics like psychoacoustics and electrostatic panels, but rather start fresh from zero while still covering enough subjects to facilitate a different kind of debate. And so far my decision seems to be paying off ;-)

I just wanted to present the "non-technical" aspects of the decision as being important as well as an addendum to what you presented.

Absolutely. I've already modified the original article slightly to include some of your observations and I intend to fully expand on those subjects in future, more in depth articles if there's enough interest. (I'm currently writing one about setting up a club PA properly. Another topic in dire need of some attention in my view).

Welcome to the board, BTW .

Thank you very much. Glad to participate in the discussions!

 

[Z3NO]

I thought 10dB was a doubling/halving the volume in SPL? And 3dB was voltage/power?

Other than that I found it to be a very good read. Fair play.

Hi philbagg, thanks for your feedback. It's much appreciated.

The dB topic is another much debated and little understood one, so I should put it on my list of articles to write about, but I'm not great at explaining (and understanding) the maths involved so bear with me.

What I refer to as 'volume' I consider as amplitude, or in other words, intensity of a signal by adding two equal signals to each other. In which case a 3dB increase means a doubling of the intensity, or loudness (6dB means 4 times and 10dB mean 10 times)...

If we refer to voltage signal (which translates to SPL) we will obtain a 6dB increase by doubling the signal (voltage), so for example if we double the voltage to a single speaker, that speaker will give us a 6dB increase, (meaning 4x intensity) however... in a real life physical scenario where the doubling of the voltage means adding a second perfectly aligned speaker that produces the same signal, this 6dB increase will only be effective in 1 place. At the exact same distance from both speakers, while in some other areas there will be cancellations (thus resulting in a 0dB increase) while the overall SPL increase in the area covered by both speakers will still only be 3dB.

At least, that's my (limited) understanding of the subject. Any takers?

 

[philbagg]

At least, that's my (limited) understanding of the subject. Any takers?

Not me anyway

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

I don't think I've ever seen so civil an exchange on this board.
Congratulations on the maturity, gentlemen.

Your mother swims after troop ships!

JUST KIDDING!!

G.