The View from 2005: There’s a lot to say about this in 2005! I’ve been busy, and this topic has consumed a major part of my professional life.

The short story is that Manny LaCarrubba (you’ll encounter him in the article) and I formed Sausalito Audio Works, to develop and market Manny’s wide dispersion device, which we called an Acoustic Lens (ALT). Since 1997, I’ve been commuting to Denmark to work on the development of a remarkable range of loudspeakers by Bang & Olufsen, one of the oldest and most sophisticated audio manufacturers in the world.

This range of speakers we (er, they) have developed is directly relevant to the thinking in this article. Bang & Olufsen’s BeoLab 5 probably comes closer to meeting the requirements for a BIG reference monitor than any other loudspeaker ever placed in regular production. It reasonably solves to “listening back” problem, the low-frequency problem (3 dB down at 20 Hz.), the power problem (2500 Watts built in each speaker), the room problem (it has a computer built in to analyze and correct for the power response of the room) and the dispersion problem (via our Acoustic Lens). Happily, they are pretty cheap for what they are and do ($18K a pair). I’ve been using BeoLab 5s as main monitors in my studio for two years now and they work wonderfully well. So, in the article, every time I refer to a B&W 801, substitute a BeoLab 5! You’ll save a bundle!!

At the same time, B&O has come out with an absolutely tiny loudspeaker using our ALT (the BeoLab 3) which works extremely well as a powered near field speaker. I use a pair of them as well. Although these aren’t designed as “professional” speakers, they work wonderfully well as such. If you want to get more info, contact Parsons Audio

 (781-431-8708) for details.

The Current State of Monitoring

In the recording business, it is reasonable to think of our loudspeakers as musical instruments. The concept is a sensible and obvious one, and when you think of loudspeakers this way, the rest of the music production process becomes a little easier to understand. However, loudspeakers have a couple of unique qualities, as musical instruments, that are worth keeping in mind.

First, loudspeakers are the only musical instruments that are designed to mimic other instruments rather than have a sound of their own. In a perfect world, you’d never hear a loudspeaker, just the sounds of other instruments it was playing back.

Second, loudspeakers aren’t just supposed to reproduce other musical sounds. They are also supposed to reproduce the sounds of the space in which those instruments were recorded. This adds an important and complex layer of extra information to be transmitted by the speaker.

Third, speakers are generally used in phase-locked pairs (for stereo), a concept that has no meaning for traditional acoustic sound sources. It is this stereophonic pairing that permits the “sound of space” mentioned above to be transmitted really effectively.

Listening Back

For music playback, then, we use speakers, in stereo pairs (at least), to realistically mimic the sounds of other instruments, while imparting as little of their own sound as possible, and to provide the listener with an illusion that she/he is in the space where the recording was made or, in the case of multitrack recording, in some imaginary space created by artificial reverb. Which is to say, we need loudspeakers to listen back in time, to reproduce events that happened at some earlier time in some other space.

This is pretty straightforward, and it leads to the design of “reference” loudspeakers. The idea is that loudspeakers should be able to reproduce, accurately, the sound levels and frequencies of the original event(s). The way to do this is to design a speaker that will reproduce the entire audio window, from 20 Hz. to 20 kHz. and from 0 to 120 dB SPL. There are speakers that actually try to approach this ideal - Genelec’s 1035Bs, or the Wilson X-1/Grand Slamm. Such speakers are expensive – the Genelecs cost $50,000 a pair while the Wilsons come in at $64 grand! It really costs to build transducers with flat frequency response that will play that loud! Such loudspeakers, even with current technology, must be BIG, in order to reproduce the bottom two octaves at high volume levels.

There are, of course, many somewhat lesser speakers that also have the flat frequency response of such speakers, but without the ability to play at such high sound pressure levels without distortion. The B&W 801 is typical of such a design. The use of such speakers is a reasonable and necessary compromise. If you can bring yourself to limit your listening to levels 15 dB below such speakers’ maximum output level, you can save a chunk of money! This generally means you won’t listen at levels much over 90 dB SPL. This still isn’t soft soft, nor is it cheap cheap. It’s kind of like buying a Lexus instead of a Rolls.