It's A Wine-Tasting, Not A Shoot-Out

What’s Going On Here?

Wine-tasting is a good way to think of it, much better than gun-slinging. You sit around, sample a bunch of different wines to get a sense of the range of flavors. In between, you munch on strawberries and other stuff to keep your nose and tongue from going totally numb. After a while, you find you’re pretty drunk, but what the hell, this is really cool, and you are really getting into the flavors now, man, noticing all kinds of hip new sensations you never noticed before. In vino veritas.

This was kind of like a wine-tasting. We weren’t trying to rate speakers, but rather, for the sake of our own professional interest, to get a sense of where small speakers are at these days, in a relaxed, informal, fun and reasonably professional way.

What happened was, Tom Bates pulled together eighteen pairs of so-called near-field monitors, a studio in Connecticut, and a bunch of some of the top recording engineers/producers in New York plus some peripheral players like me. We took the better part of a Sunday in February to listen, listen again and then listen some more, eat, drink, talk shop, tell stories, and then listen and listen some more, until we finally just plain had to stop.

Tom has pulled this stunt before. About a year ago, he gathered many of the same audio pros together and spent a day listening to microphone preamps. Why? Because most of the more successful recording engineers never get a chance to just sit down and check out a broad range of comparable gear. Tom figured that if he set it up right, so everybody could get in and out in a reasonable amount of time, and it was fun, why, not only would the guys do it, it might actually be useful!

Well, the mic preamp session was so much fun (and useful!) that everybody asked Tom if they could do it again, like every month or so. Life being what it is, it took Tom about a year to get around to the second session, a “wine-tasting” of near-field monitors. This time, we got to listen to eighteen different pairs of loudspeakers in one sitting. Such opportunities don’t come along that often, and when they do they’re worth reporting. Here goes . . .

What We Did, What We Didn’t

This all took place at Ambient Recording, in Stamford, Connecticut. Ambient is a big-room studio catering to serious album-project clients who want up-market acoustics. We did all our listening in the control room, with a fairly primo setup: either a top-of-the-line Sony CD player or Tascam DA-30 DAT with direct digital outs feeding a Meridian digital level-control/ditherer which in turn fed a Krell 20-bit DAC. Balanced analog outputs from the Krell went to the most recent version of the Hafler TransNova 9505 power amp, and then via special cables supplied by Weslake to the speakers under test. For the powered monitors, the Krell outputs were sent directly to the speakers. Definitely better than mid-fi.

The speakers were placed on some special really hip stands Tom Jung found, made by Sound Anchor, that put the speakers directly above the meter bridge of the SSL console, but isolated from it. We listened at moderately loud levels (ca. 90 dB SPL) but never really cranked anything, noting that some speakers had to work pretty hard with some of the low-frequency peaks even at that modest nearfield level.

We all wandered around the control room during the tests – the median plane was shared by everybody and nobody got too piggy about it – listening to bits and pieces of lots of different program material, mostly recording engineer standards (Nightfly, Toto IV, etc.,). Interestingly, very few people brought their own work, but several people brought Tom Jung’s work (Mediterranean, Thursday’s Diva), and so it was kind of fun to ask him how stuff sounded compared to when he’d mixed it.

Anyway, the first listening session ran for about five hours, during which time we dragged in the eighteen pairs of monitors in no particular order (except that the powered ones went last because of the change in setup they required). We spent about twenty minutes on any given monitor pair, although some pairs were fairly quickly and summarily set aside.

By the time the first run-through was done, our ears were toast and our brains were zucchini-fudge swirl. To recover, we all piled into cars and drove around Stamford for a while, ending up at an Indian restaurant where some of the more brain-dead among us tried to see just how hot they could get the kitchen to make the food. To offset this effect, we kept ordering rounds of Taj Mahal beer (you, know, those really big bottles!). Time passed quickly, I think.

Refreshed, we returned to Ambient to listen to the monitors that really tweaked our interest. We spent the next four hours listening to six pairs, going slow and stopping for extended discussions. Finally, the band that had the next day booked started loading in and we had to wrap it up.

All of this was informal and unscientific. No effort was made to standardize levels or conceal the brands of the speakers. No controls were placed on evaluation criteria or method. People wandered in and out, taking coffee/beer/sandwich breaks in Ambient’s very comfy lounge. Everybody was very polite and considerate about letting anybody and everybody hear what they wanted, for pretty much as long as they wanted. Nobody abused this, and there was surprisingly little pontificating or stage-hogging. (As one of us put it, “I guess we all checked our egos at the door.”) We all got tired from time to time, and everybody lost their concentration on numerous occasions.

One indicator of monitor quality seemed to be crowd dynamics. For some monitors, people would just begin to line up on the median plane, listening seriously and intently, or moving just off the plane to give somebody else a chance. For other speakers, people would just begin to drift away, get a sandwich, check their answering machine, start gossiping. It would have been interesting to do time-lapse photography of the entire session.

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