An Editorial

I believe that, as musicians and as a recording industry, we tend to underestimate and devalue our need for high quality in our listening, er, monitoring systems. Traditional musicians tend to regard loudspeakers with distaste and indifference (they know speakers don't sound very good, certainly not like real instruments), and overcoming the difficulties in getting speakers to sound really good, which usually requires serious time and bucks, is beyond most of them. I saw this devaluation tendency lots at Berklee, even in the Music Technology Division, where Music Synthesis Majors spend four years wearing headphones and almost never working with speakers and in my old department where a new SSL console lives in the same control room with elderly, ragged-response Fostex horn-type monitors hanging on chains in an acoustically mediocre room.

We tend to obsess over electronic hardware at the expense of acoustic monitoring. The ads in our trade mags are useful for revealing, by the fantasies they show, what our real desires and expectations are, as in, for instance, the ones selling synth software that show some guy/gal busy composing/recording with guitar and a computer and a couple of tiny little speakers lying around on a desk, or the rackmount ads that show all this stuff, keyboards 'n computers 'n consoles 'n audio toys galore packed into a gigundous wrap-around rack with no possible way to hear anything except with little speakers about a foot from your face. The message is clear: we believe the music resides in the black boxes: the computers, the synths, the racks 'n stuff. Speakers are necessary, but trivial. Kind of like patch cords.

My own experience has been that most actual monitoring set-ups, like the ones in the ad fantasies, are seriously limited sonically, although with practice and experience it may be possible to work with them. Whatever. Bob Ludwig, one of our finest mastering engineers, has often pointed out that many of the recordings he is called upon to master have serious equalization deficiencies and audible production flaws that are directly attributable to poor monitoring environments that both color the sound badly and mask many of the production flaws.

So, as part of my new home studio design effort, knowing what I know now, I want to give far more priority to monitoring quality than I have in the past. So, I'm starting with monitoring quality as a first priority and concern. I want a monitoring system/room that (a) can be reasonably described and measured as excellent, (b) will be flexible and suitable for research, critical listening and music production, and (c) will be approximately in compliance with the Range Rule (more later) in regard to home listening environments. Fortunately, it's quiet around here and I have few isolation problems. I am also giving up the capability for doing acoustic recording in favor of monitoring excellence in the mix and postproduction phase of things.