Protected: Choosing Monitors
Setting up your Monitors and your room – What are the different types of monitors? – How should your monitors be positioned? – Getting the best acoustics out of your room.
On with the mix! – Organising and balancing your tracks – Balancing and stereo panning – The frequency spectrum and equalization – Gain structure
Choosing the right monitors for your studio is an essential part of the recording process, from the amateur’s bedroom set-up through to the most
professional recording studio. Not just simply speakers, monitors should be considered highly technical pieces of equipment designed to provide you with accurate sound reproduction for recording and mixing.
What we are looking for when acquiring a good set of monitors is a ‘neutral average’. This essentially means that the sonic recreation is neither too bright nor too ‘muddy’ or dull. Our intention should be that our productions should be able to translate across a range of playback devices from portable MP3 players through to top-end hi-fi systems. It might often have been the case that your productions sound fantastic on your home set-up but awful in your car system. So then, the tonal balance of your monitor system needs to be as close to the ‘population average’ as possible, i.e. the type of medium the majority of people consumes their music through. After all, it is unlikely that your consumer will be listening to your productions on the same equipment as you. In most home studios the typical monitor set-up will be a pair of ‘nearfield’ monitors or a couple of wall- or stand-mounted hi-fi speakers.
Choosing the right monitor is vital to getting the most out of a recording session as a badly chosen set will make even the best microphones and other equipment irrelevant. Factors that will likely inform your choice of monitors will be quality, price and power, but there are others.
You are only as strong as your weakest link.
The first consideration for you to undertake is an assessment of your current set-up. Whilst top-end monitors can be great assets to your studio, pairing them up with low quality cables and cheap mixers will do nothing to create the sonic environment for which they were intended. A running theme throughout this course will be the old adage that ‘you are only as strong as your weakest link’.
Passive or Active?
Another facet of your evaluation might be whether to buy ‘passive’ (or unpowered) monitors or whether ‘active’ (powered) monitors might be more applicable. The way that you intend to position and mount your speakers, as well as their orientation, will have a huge effect on the final sound that your room or space achieves. If you are not intending to do anything in the way of acoustic treatment, then there will be little point in purchasing huge speakers and pumping sub-woofers if you only have a small space.
A fresh-faced Dave Garnish at Air Lyndhurst Hall in the 90s!
Professional Monitoring
The type of set-up you would expect to see in your archetypal professional studio will include a pair of substantial wall-mounted main monitors and one or more pairs of nearfield monitors situated on the desk ‘meterbridge’, used to try and recreate the experience of the home listener. Another benefit of using several different types of monitor is that you should be able to identify problem areas
Listening to a variety of systems and monitors will help you to gauge and reference the differences in quality with respect to the type of final sound you are attempting to achieve. It is not so much how good the monitors sound but how accurately they portray the current mix in its true unbiased state. This will be difficult to know for the untrained ear, which is why listening on many different system set-ups is so important
Your Budget
How much you are prepared to spend on your studio monitors is a consideration, but not one that should be ignored in the interest of trying to save money. There are monitors for every budget but you should really consider buying the best that your budget will allow to complement the rest of your equipment.
How big is your studio?
The size of your studio is a huge factor in determining the choice of suitable monitors – so measure it! As we have already outlined, much of home mixing is done using ‘nearfield’ monitors, which are designed to sit from three to five feet away from the listener – hence the name! Other, more expensive brands can be situated much further away from the listener and are most often seen in more professional studios, so you will need to do a little research into which monitors work better within the space that you have.
Types of monitors and near-field monitor design.
Near-field monitors are the most common studio monitors designed for close listening of between three to five feet.
Listening from this close proximity will make the acoustics of a badly treated room less noticeable since the sounds reach the ears first before having a chance to be reflected off other surfaces – ideal for home studios since it will be unlikely that an acoustic engineer will have treated the average bedroom space!
The early 80s saw the rise of the term ‘near-field monitor’ (just predating the meteoric rise of the home-recording studio), originally used to describe the auxiliary monitors that were placed on the meterbridge of large commercial studios. The ‘Auratone 5C’ was the pioneer of its kind and is little more than a five-inch, full-range driver placed within a small cube. There was no allusion to sonic precision or full representation of bandwidth – it was simply used to recreate the sonic conditions afforded by your average A M radio or old television sets. Although not really near-field in the way that we understand the term now, it did set the precedent for this type of monitoring and gave birth to perhaps the most famous of its breed, the Yamaha NS10M.
(“the yamaha NS10M”)
The recording world has changed with the good quality algorithms that have been able to recreate digitally, in the form of software, the vast array of ‘outboard’ gear that was once the preserve of commercial studios with huge financial resources. Recording spaces have been downsized as a result and often many commercial control rooms will not be able to accommodate huge wall-mounted monitors. As such, near-field monitors have enjoyed a promotion in this respect, and more often than not will be the only type of monitoring used in the studio. Even when the top mixing engineer has a huge array of monitors at their disposal, it is often the near-fields that become the main reference point for monitoring, albeit of two differing designs – ported and un- ported.
Ported and Un-Ported Monitors
Given the huge number of models and designs available, choosing a monitoring system can be a daunting prospect. The following chapter will help illuminate one of the biggest decisions in this area regarding the choice between either sealed box (un-ported) or reflex (ported) designs.
Sealed Box Design
The main purpose of the speaker enclosure is to prevent the sound waves from the rear of the speaker, which are out-of-phase, combining negatively with the positive phase sound waves emanating from the front of the speaker. This can cause patterns of interference and cancellation, which will be detrimental to the overall efficiency of the speaker. This facet can be most commonly observed with low frequencies, being of larger wavelengths big enough to compromise the whole of the listening space.
Clearly this is not a realistic option, but we can try and get as close as possible to this concept by building a sealed box and placing the speaker to the front baffle. The rear of the box is usually filled with foam, fiberglass and other types of wadding in an attempt to absorb the undesirable soundwaves coming from the rear of the cone.
Generally however, it is seen that this type of arrangement limits the bass response in comparison to ported set-ups. On the upside, if correctly designed these cabinets will afford a better transient response over the low frequencies, which should result in what is generally considered to be a ‘tighter’ sound. Also, we will see that the phase response can be extremely smooth with very little phase shift and a shallow roll-off slope. Even small infinite-baffle speakers can emit an audible bass at low frequencies, albeit without the sub bass dominating the space.
Many regard the infinite-baffle design as the best solution for providing a sound that is least compromised for monitoring purposes. Both the Auratone and the Yamaha NS10s are infinite-baffle designs and yet, surprisingly, this design is not the most common.
Ported and base reflex design
The most common design of studio monitor is what is referred to as the ‘reflex’ or ‘ported’ cabinet, which exploits the inherent resonance of the cabinet in a deliberate fashion to advantageously utilise the sound waves emitted from the rear of loudspeaker cone. The theory of the port, in this instance, is to try and get the cabinet to resonate at a specifically chosen low frequency – not a quantum leap from the effect of blowing over the top an empty bottle. Rather than sealing the box, in an attempt to absorb the rear frequencies, the cabinet has a hole through which the sound can escape, and if done correctly this should add positively to the overall listening experience. These holes or ports may be located on the front or rear of the cabinet, and may be seen as one or more round holes or slots.
As with most things, there exist pros and cons to each design. One of the negative effects of the ported cabinet, or in-fact any resonating system, is that it will smear transient signals over time. What this means in monitoring terms is that this behaviour will obscure small changes in dynamics in the signal being auditioned, and can also reduce the clarity of the mid-range. Effectively, this means that a badly designed ported system can make it very hard to correctly judge the levels of the bass frequencies properly. This can result in quite severe differences between the mix that you produce and the mix that is experienced by others.
A further issue arises from the attributes of frequency and phase response when dealing with ported resonance. Whilst the roll-off point for the lower frequencies can be extended significantly further using the reflex design as opposed to the sealed box, the slope is nowhere near as shallow and, in consequence, the phase shifts are much bigger. This means that the bass output is larger down to the roll-off point but then falls away far quicker, and the reflex cabinet has the capacity to produce extremely low frequencies at much lower levels than the infinite-baffle. These inherently large phase shifts detract from the natural true reception of the bass end.
One question that should be asked is: if within the upper frequencies the sealed box is more significant, why then is the un-ported sealed design less commonly used?
The reason for this lies in the fact that, generally, the tuning of a ported box is geared towards the lowest fundamentals that the woofer can emit, and will only come into play around those chosen frequencies. In well-designed ported speakers you should not experience much difference in the transient response or phase shifts at the higher frequencies.
Having said all of this, you may still not know the difference, since the human ear’s ability to detect phase shifts becomes increasingly difficult with lower frequencies. This is ultimately why the marketplace offers very fine examples of both designs. Therefore, armed with the knowledge you now have, by far the best thing to do will be to let your own ears have the final say.
Another question that you might be considering is: if an accurate representation is what we are trying to experience, why is it that some ‘limited range’ or lower quality monitors have become the standard? The reason is quite simple and started with small Auratone 5C boxes. The idea was that if the mix could be represented through such a terribly limited medium but in such a way that all of the components of the song could be distinguished, then it should more than adequately serve anything better. In other words: if it sounds okay on something bad then it should sound okay, or better, on something good. In this case the principle holds true – and that is why the Yamaha NS10s, sharing many of the limited traits of its predecessor, came to the fore in the way that they did.
In technical terms, the reason why the Auratone and NS10 have done so well over time and become the standard fare for the top mixing engineer, is all down to the skewed frequency response, absence of LF resonances, extremely low distortion, and a surprisingly accurate transient response. And although the drivers may be small they are extremely responsive.
With regards to the mixing process, two of the most critical aspects of contemporary music can be found in the ratio between the kick and the bass instruments, and also in the balance between mid-range instrumentations such as guitars, snares, voices and keyboards. One of the attributes that speakers like the Auratone and the NS10 possess is the ability to reveal balance anomalies within the mid-range. In these speakers the central audio spectrum is emphasized in a way that exposes discrete changes in balance very clearly. In this regard, mix engineers know that if the mix sounds right on this media, it will be right and able to translate across the different kinds of mediums that people use in their everyday consumption of musical material. Whether it’s a cheap radio or an expensive hi-fi, the net result should be the best sonic interpretation for the medium used.
One of the central concerns when balancing the kick and bass is most often to do with what is termed ‘overhang’. Overhang is a low-frequency resonance, which is most associated with ported reflex speakers, and this has the effect of camouflaging the true envelope of low-frequency signals. Conversely, the infinite-baffle designs usually have quite precise transient behaviour, and with no ports to cause resonance it makes it a good deal easier to determine the true characteristic of bass or low-frequency timbres. Speakers of this nature are very adept at highlighting poor balance choices – between vocals and rhythm sections for example. Also, they excel at revealing less-than-perfect equalization and can show how a kick can be lost entirely under a bass pattern on anything but full-range monitors if the equalization has been overlooked.
The archetypal ‘grot box’ as they are sometimes lovingly referred to, has been part of the essential kit for the mixing engineer since the birth of the Auratone and its successor the NS10. But whilst these two giants have enjoyed almost celebrity status, there exist today a huge range of choices
Q: Given that the Auratone and NS10 have been heralded as the champions of the reference monitor, is there any point in purchasing mid-range to top-end brands?
A: Sure – just as you would find qualitative differences in microphones, guitars, preamps, keyboards, etc. that vary in price, so it is with reference monitors. The old adage that “the devil is in the details” is still true. Generally speaking, manufacturers with monitors costing more, such as Genelec, Adam and Mackie (among many) have spent more time developing a better design and use higher quality components. This equates to more accurate imaging, smoother frequency response, extended low frequencies, clearer high frequencies and consistent quality at different dynamic levels. In other words: better mixes, faster. Saying that, today’s crop of monitors from M -Audio, Samson, Edirol (and others) that come in for just a few hundred pounds are tremendous value for many desktop audio professionals who aren’t necessarily planning to finish their mixes (or master) on their own. Our advice is to purchase the best set of monitors your budget allows – your mix and your ears will thank you.
As well as the inherent problems of the bass reflex design in low-quality speakers, many of the these cheap domestic speakers will overcompensate on the high end to add a degree of excitement to the sound quality, under-represent the mid-range to make the mix sound larger than it actually is, and often have an overly lumpy resonant bottom-end. As well as all of this, you can often encounter issues with the continuous high output levels that are used in the professional mixing environment.
Clearly, for many of you it will seem counter-intuitive to spend a great deal of money on speakers that do not sound at all pleasing to the ear – but that is the point, since the new breed of monitors are designed specifically to provide you with an accurate, unbiased representation of your mix. It may be that the Auratone and NS10 were the pioneers of their day, and have been an indispensable tool for the mixing engineer for many years, but they too had their problems. The advent of top-end monitoring has radically improved over the years and, whilst not completely obsolete, the role of the Auratone and NS10 are no longer entirely critical components as they once were.
A final consideration when purchasing your monitors will be to try, as much as possible, to recreate similar conditions of your own space and attempt to audition the speakers in an arrangement that you intend to use. If they are to be used against a wall space then test them out in this fashion or, conversely, away from a wall space if this will be your intention in your own set-up. Do not be tempted to try and gauge a series of speakers clustered together for the sake of showroom space – you will need to appreciate them in a suitable space and any good dealer should be happy to accommodate your wishes from a sympathetic position.
