LOL...my main monitors were made and purchased before many/most HR members were born! They may not be perfect (though to my ear they're darn good) but they're like a comfortable pair of slippers. I know them very, very well (and paid gawd knows how much to ship them from the UK to Aus!).
Haha! That ^ tends to give the lie to the idea that speakers "run in" since logically Bobbs, those (name?) should by now be "run out"!
Accuracy USED to be judged by, wait for it, for this is a CO---OSMIC idea, listening to known,
natural sounds! One of the most difficult signals for monitors to reproduce properly is male speech. A good (only??!!)source of this is Radio3 presenters. Any commercial station will be EQ'ed and comp'ed to buggery. Our own
Classic FM makes even the gals sound as tho' they have hairy chests. Good recordings of piano, jangling keys, bells anything with a wide bandwidth that you can reproduce live.
One property that is hardly ever specified, even for expensive active monitors is "self noise" That is the background hum and hiss produced by the onboard amplifiers.
"Surely that should be bugger all!" you say? You would think so and have every right to have monitors that don't hum (at all!) and produce only the faintest hiss from the tweeter with Mk1 lug against it but this is often not the case and if your work involves thru the night sessions with quiet material such as
acoustic guitar or VOX, any detectable noise at
the sweet spot can become very irritating.
Of course! If your chosen field is punk/rap/electronic gyration..Forget the last paragraph and only take a brief scan of the first!
Dave.
