Monitoring with mains

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IanW-UK

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This is probably a silly question but hey ,I'm a silly guy :D I've heard people say that monitoring with main monitors in small rooms is a bad idea, why is that? I would have thought that the extended bass and overall greater accuracy would be beneficial? Is it just a case of them overpowering the room? In which case would it be so bad to just monitor at lower listening levels?

Too many questions I know. Help out a silly Brit :)

Cheers,

Ian..............
 
I mean "Midfield" or "farfield" as opposed to "nearfield" monitors

i.e. big beasty monitors :D
 
Yo Ian:

I'll have a laphroig neat please.

Depending on your gear, time doing recording, etc., you can use anything you want to monitor your sounds.

BUT, how will your final mixes sound on other gear?

Probably all right. I'll bet folks around here use about everything from tin cans with a string to the best monitors around -- I recall that the first big tune of Elvis, "Heartbreak Hotel" was using a drummer who played a paper box or something like that.

Creativity and ingenuity and practice can do the trick.

Green Hornet:D :cool: :p
 
IanW-UK said:
This is probably a silly question but hey ,I'm a silly guy :D I've heard people say that monitoring with main monitors in small rooms is a bad idea, why is that? I would have thought that the extended bass and overall greater accuracy would be beneficial? Is it just a case of them overpowering the room? In which case would it be so bad to just monitor at lower listening levels?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I understand any of Hornet's answer, but here's mine:

You're on the right track with overpowering the room, but it has more to do with the ratio of direct (speakers to ears) vs. reflected (speakers to walls/floor/ceiling/furniture to ears) sound.

In a small room, if you are listening to big monitors set, say, 10 feet back from the mixing position, you will get as much or even possibly more reflected sound than direct sound unless you spend an incredible amount of time and money trying to do acoustic treatment of the room. This means you are likely to have no idea what you are really hearing, i.e. what is actually in the mix vs. what is being contributed by the room reflections and all the filtering that the interaction of those reflections is causing.

In a larger room this is less of a problem, and is certainly easier to control.

So that would raise the question, why not just place your humungous speakers in a nearfield position and turn the volume down a bit?

The answer is that the various drivers on the far-fields are physically separated by a goodly amount of real-estate, so that if you listen to them at an unintended (by the designer) close range, it will be difficult if not impossible to find a sweet spot where the various frequencies are reaching your ears in phase.
 
Yo Dog of diminiuative dimensions:

"Creativity, ingenutity, and practice...."

Your succinct words reverberate the quotation above.

Knowledge is power and sometimes by practicing we all get lucky and learn, as well as from succinct words.

Green Hornet :D :D :p :p :cool:
 
Mains, whether sofits or something like a Genelec 1036a, when done right, are very flat. They also are extremely precise. The problem is that very few people (none) have speakers that precise at home. It takes a lot of practice to mix on mains and have it translate. At least, this is the theory. I tend to think they sound too impressive for mixing. If I listen on mains, I can hear all the details that are lost on other speakers, so I don't try to keep things as clean.

Inversely, I really like mains for tracking, because I can hear all the details quite easily, which helps me know if something is going to pop up later which I need to worry about.

By the way, midfields and mains are very different things. Mains are far fields, and are hopefully sofit mounted (something which I do not want out of near- or mid-field monitors).

And then we get to the most important use for mains. They are what you pump the mix through when you do not want the client to question your mix. They will almost always love it through the mains. Client Impressers, as we say.

I wish I had some these days.

Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
Thanks for the replies guys, I was hoping u were going to say "there's no reason at all not to use em!!" :D Reason being i've seen a pair of tannoy system 10 dmt mk2s (midfields I think?) going VERY cheap and I need some monitors that will go down low. I guess I'll just have to wait till i can afford some nearfiels with extended bass response or get a sub for my yorkvilles.

Cheers all.

Ian...........
 
Get em. Mains are great for tracking, and I usually check the low end on mains while I am mixing, I just don't rely on them. They are a double check when mixing

Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
The Green Hornet said:
Yo Dog of diminiuative dimensions:

"Creativity, ingenutity, and practice...."

Your succinct words reverberate the quotation above.

Knowledge is power and sometimes by practicing we all get lucky and learn, as well as from succinct words.

Green Hornet :D :D :p :p :cool:
Click to expand...

Maybe I need to do more drugs...
 
Re: Re: Monitoring with mains

littledog said:
.... so that if you listen to them at an unintended (by the designer) close range, it will be difficult if not impossible to find a sweet spot where the various frequencies are reaching your ears in phase.
Click to expand...
Sorry, I have to disagree with this statement completely. True that if the room is pumping enough to interfere with the monitoring enviroment there will be some phase distortion due to reflection but when properly used the studio mains will be fairly accurate.....and....

The bigger the speakers the wider the sweet spot.

That is just common sense.
 
Look at the size of the cabs and drivers...now think about the radiation patterns..Little Dogs comment seems resonable to me..Where the hell are the speaker gurus?


Don
 
So what if you have a small room that has been properly treated? I guess the negative effects would be minimised. This begs the question why do so few small studios use em? I've been to loads of studios that just have a bitty pair of nearfields (even a commercial studio using pc speakers to monitor, no joke :p ). I have the most trouble with low end frequencies when mixing and so do a lot of folk it seems. I'm suprised there aren't more lowish priced nearfields about with extended bass, I think there'd be a huge market for em.

So what u guys reckon, sub for me passive yorkies? or save for some mackie 824s, genelec 1031a's, dynaudio bm15a's etc?

(the tannoys have gone now btw, sold for £300!! that's about $450)
 
I'm sure those Dynaudio or Genelecs would be outstanding speakers.

I would say that nearfeilds have a tighter and more detailed sweet spot but the mains or soffit monitors in most pro rooms are tuned to the room and would give a very wide albeit less defined sweet spot, great for impact but not as good for stereo imaging..which may have been what littledog meant.
 
Re: Re: Re: Monitoring with mains

jake-owa said:
Sorry, I have to disagree with this statement completely. True that if the room is pumping enough to interfere with the monitoring enviroment there will be some phase distortion due to reflection but when properly used the studio mains will be fairly accurate.....and....

The bigger the speakers the wider the sweet spot.

That is just common sense.
Click to expand...

Perhaps I didn't communicate the point clearly. My objection to using far-fields as near-fields has nothing to do with room reflections. It has to do with physical dimensions of the individual drivers. If you are five feet away from a speaker that is so big that the tweeter is two feet away from the center of the woofer, you will get severe phase problems between the highs and the lows unless you stay perfectly glued to a relatively tiny sweet spot.

The fact that bigger speakers have a wider sweet spot is true... but only if you are listening to them at the intended distance, and not at an arms length or so away. And then the room problems become a factor.
 
Most of the manufacturers of Mastering Mains will publish the optimum distance for listening and speaker spread. Its typically been 10 to 14 feet back with the speakers 8 to 14 feet apart. Bass frequencies take longer to express, if your too close to a 12 woofer youll over compensate. Correct me if Im wront, but typicaly the mix is set up on the nearfields and then swapped over to the mains for the mooks and musicians in the back of the control room. Im not sure the soffits are always the best way to go for mains, there are alot of variables that goes into it, and usually its associated with money. PSW has a thread where John Sayers, Sjoerd Koppert, Brad Blackwood, Thomas Barefoot and others were discussing freestanding vs soffit and it was quite educational. Its not just a matter of throwing them into a box, its quite finicky. The mian point is that the room and speakers must be able to express the frequency bandwidth without misleading artifacts that cause overcompensation. Maybe Thomas Barefoot might take a moment to clarifiy or correct our perceptions.

Happy Monday :)

SoMm
 
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