Using BIG Monitors

It’s should be obvious from all of the above that BIG reference monitors are just as important as In-Yer-Face® monitors, even if they do represent complication and a serious expense. I tend to think they are as important as having a couple really good microphones. Without them, it is pretty difficult to craft really good mixes, although it can still be done. And, as I’ve said in earlier articles, you really need a range of monitors with which to produce recordings. There is no single correct loudspeaker for music production work.

Installation

Because BIG loudspeakers, especially, really are inseparable from the room in which they are playing, good installation is essential. This can be really simple if your control room is big enough. Just move them far enough from walls to minimize interference problems and make them reasonably symmetrical in the room and absolutely symmetrical (within an inch!) in regard to your desired median plane.

If you wish to install them in wall soffits, you need to give the wall surface considerable integrity and rigidity, and you need to mount the speakers either so that they are completely decoupled from the surface of the room or else so that coupling is sufficiently massive and rigid that it damps the low-frequency vibration of the loudspeaker cabinet, vibration which is generally quite a significant part of the loudspeakers output.

The actual details of how to do this are beyond the scope of this article, but it is important to keep in mind that such installation needs to be done with considerable care to get your money’s worth out of the speakers themselves. You may want a professional carpenter and a good industrial-strength studio designer to help. On the other hand, many of you readers are really trying to do this on the cheap by doing things yourself (you may even be building your own speakers, for instance). That’s fine, and you can get some great results if you simply take some real care in your measurement and consideration of the physics and engineering involved. As the old-time carpenters say, “Measure twice, cut once.” You might also do a chunk of reading before you head off to the lumber yard.

Monitor Switching

Another problem pertaining to a monitor system that includes both reference speakers and a variety of look-ahead speakers is the problem of easily and reliably switching between them. The obvious but expensive route is to simply wire up a distribution switch from the monitor out on your console (often it is built in) and send audio to a separate power amplifier for each speaker pair. With four pairs of speakers, that can get expensive, even if you use cheap amplifiers for your cheap speakers. It has the additional hazard of introducing differences that may be attributable to the amplifiers rather than the speakers, which confuses problem solving.

An alternative solution (the way it is done in all the Berklee studios, for instance) is a switcher that permits one power amplifier to be switched between multiple speaker sets. This is a little complicated (usually you use a whole bunch of relays) because you must have switch-selected level trimmers before the power amplifier for each amplifier, so you can adjust all the various speaker levels to be the same at the mix position, regardless of their efficiency or relative placement.

What This All Means To You

One of the great attractions of audio these days is the way costs have plummeted and capabilities have expanded! Anybody can afford to play, in the privacy of their own home! Tremendous!

There are some places, however, where costs haven’t gone down. These include the two areas that have the most critical and important impact on the quality of your sound: the transducers and the transducers!

I started this article by talking about loudspeakers as musical instruments. If you consider pianos, for a second, it should give you a sense of what we’re really up against. A really good new piano, say the pianistic equivalent of a Neumann TLM 170 microphone or a pair of B&W 801 loudspeakers, which is to say something like a 9-foot Steinway, will set you back probably $50 grand. Good musical instruments aren’t cheap, except in the virtual realm!

So, you’re faced with the question: Do I really need a 9’ Steinway, or a set of TLM 170s, or B&W 801s, to cut good keyboard tracks? You have to answer this by restating the question: If I can’t afford these things, can I possibly cut good enough tracks with cheaper alternatives? What do I lose? There are some corollary questions: Should I sacrifice other capabilities in order to optimize these things?

The answers all depend, of course, on your goals. You wanna record Mozart sonatas, you’re gonna need the piano. A Kurzweil, whatever it’s virtues, just isn’t going to cut it! You’re on this sort of slippery decision-making slope. There are also some crassly commercial considerations in this regard. If you are selling studio time or production services to others, really good reference monitors, with their extended bass, are an excellent sales tool that serves to set you apart from the competition. It’s worth thinking about.

In any case, good big reference loudspeakers cost a lot and to make the best of them you need to spend even more money on the room you put them in. You might even (gulp!) begin to think of your room as a musical instrument! What do you get in return for such expense?

First, you get bass. Not the throbbing, pounding, pumping bass that any clown with an EQ can generate, but smooth, accurate extended bass output that gives kick drums, acoustic pianos, electric basses and other instruments with ranges extending into the bottom octave a kind of solidity and stability that just isn’t there with lesser speakers. It’s really a revelation when you first hear it, and as you begin to trust it you can easily and quickly assess low-frequency problems and questions. Also, because of the substantial low-frequency compression that occurs in our ears (cf. the Fletcher-Munson Curves), accurate and extended physical bass response turns out to be a major help in predicting how recordings will sound on other systems.

The second thing you get from really good monitors is a kind of transparency, a “disappearing” quality if you will, where you stop hearing the monitors as such and start hearing the recorded sounds as palpably real sound sources. You begin to be able to hear into your mix, to pull out and analyze elements that are blurred, obscured, exaggerated, distorted, or simply not audible on cheaper speakers.

The third thing you get is a kind of robustness to your recordings. If you can make them sound decent on the reference speakers, they’ll probably sound decent most places. If you can make them sound decent on the reference speakers and on Auratones, you’re almost certain to have a recording that will play back well anywhere! So, good reference speakers can help with some of the listening-ahead questions.

This last, a kind of professional confidence factor, is very important, particularly when other things in your operation are less than perfect, as is almost always the case. Naturally, I personally think the “hearing” part of the recording business is probably, after the music itself, the most important part. Really good reference monitors (when you are ready to house them, power them, and pay for them) are a key tool, one that will make the other parts of your life in music production far easier and, hopefully, far more successful.

Happy crossovers!