Studio Monitors Thread (nrr)
bonzaisk8
946 Posts
Whats up peeps.Alright, so I'm in the market for some 6 to 7 inch studio monitors. The ones I'm looking at are the Alesis Prolinear 720 DSP monitors and the KRK V series 6 inch powered jonks. What I'm looking for is a sound as realistic as possible, so when you play your track in the car or on a home stereo, it will sound pretty close to the sound you hear from your monitors.what have y'all been more than happy with?any feedback would be appreciated.peace.
Comments
Yamaha NS10m:[/b] Good "all around." You won't hear any bass if you're making boom bap slaps. Ear fatigue is generally less noticeable with these, I think. Quite reliable frequency response.
Tannoy Proto-J[/b]: I still use these. Smaller speakers, more bass response than the NS10s. Reliable frequency response as well. A little bright at times. A little punchy, but nothing you can't train yourself to. Relatively cheap, I think like $400 for the pair.
Event 20/20[/b]: Probably my favorite. I've had a pair since '96, and they still kick. Pretty boomy on the low end, a little flat in the mids, but after you critically listen to 40 or 50 records on them, you have a good understanding of what these monitors bring to the mix. They're rated for some crazy wattage, like 300 or some shit. I run a Hafler P1500 @ 75watts per channel, balanced XLR, and they sound great. Fucking loud too. I generally don't push the amp past halfway, and rarely turn my mixer past 4, and I am still scattering sheetrock dust on the floor. Any more watts and I think I would operate between the 0 and 1 on the volume.
If you've got a rich uncle, or are a true baller, might I suggest Westlake BBSM10:
Subwoofer optional. Bi-amp them with a MacIntosh 2200 for the lows and a MacIntosh 250 for the mid/high and every girl you meet will instantly fall in love with you.
The BBSM4s are nice as well. Still, it's loot.
Don't flake on a decent amp either. I prefer to keep my amp out of my speaker, and therefore avoid any bi-amp situation, like the Event 20/20bias model. It's up to you, but listen to both and consider the options against what you want to do before you give your credit card to that dude named "Gomer" with the ponytail at guitar center...
You can buy some nice $500 monitors that will sound like shit if you're pushing 25 watts @ 8ohms through some bullshit Kenwood home receiver. Think about that.
NS-10's are Classic. Very flat sound. What you hear is what you get.
I've been rocking these for over a year. I got them used from a friend. IMO they are way to bass heavy.
If your a
ha...yeah, i was close to handing that piece of plastic over to "gomer" last night for them KRK V Series jonks.
But had to take a step back and do some research first.
by the way, no baller here, 700 is my cap.
respect.
cheap too
If that's the case, I'd say spend $350 on a Hafler and $350 on the monitors you like. My cousin is the manager at fullcompass.com. And those guys aren't about trying to get you into something sleek. If you do a little research (read: go to guitar center and listen, make a decision, and leave), then call the sales team at full compass, they can quote you a competitive price without haggling and have it at your house within a few days, usually. Unless you're in Madison, then you can just go there yourself.
Hi guise,
In case anyone is interested, we're having a symposium on pink noise[/b]
over in the ANNOUNCEMENTS forum tomorrow.
Here's a preview:
The characteristics of pink noise[/b]
For the purposes of this discussion, "power" means the average power or energy contained in a signal over a long period of time.
White noise has the same distribution of power for all frequencies, so there is the same amount of power between 0 and 500 Hz, 500 and 1,000 Hz or 20,000 and 20,500 Hz.
Pink noise has the same distribution of power for each octave, so the power between 0.5 Hz and 1 Hz is the same as between 5,000 Hz and 10,000 Hz.
Since power is proportional to amplitude squared, the energy per Hz will decline at higher frequencies at the rate of about -3dB per octave. To be absolutely precise, the rolloff should be -10dB/decade, which is about 3.0102999 dB/octave.
The uses of pink noise[/b]
The most obvious use of pink noise is as an audio signal, to be used directly, to be filtered or to be used to modulate something.
I am also interested in pink noise way below 1 Hz as a control signal for simulating randomly fluctuating aspects of music. For instance, I might want some aspect of a piece to fluctuate on a minute-by-minute basis, so I need random numbers with energy at 0.01 Hz and below.
My particular interest is being able to sculpt such control signals from a pink noise source purely by the use of filters. The idea would be that I could have a band-pass filter with a certain bandwidth in octaves (or fractions of an octave) and that I could choose to set its frequency as I liked, without affecting the RMS level of its output. Without a pink noise source ??? for instance by using a white noise source ??? it becomes very difficult to adjust the piece by changing the frequency of the sculpting filter, because this also affects the resultant signal level,
Ideally, for control purposes (eg. "k" rate noise in Csound) I would like to be able to specify noise with:
1 - A certain lower bounding frequency. Eg. 0.1 Hz. Below that, there would either be little energy, or the energy would remain flat per Hz, rather than rising per Hz to give the 3dB/octave characteristic of pink noise. So it would be "white" below 0.1 Hz.
2 - A certain "RMS level per octave. For instance 5.0 RMS per octave. Therefore a perfect filter which excluded everything but an octave ??? no matter which octave above the lower bounding frequency ??? would average an RMS level of 5.0. Noise being noise, it would take a long time to average out the fluctuations to measure this accurately.
3 - It might also be desirable to specify an upper bounding frequency, to reduce computational load where high frequencies were not required.
In the future I intend to write a Csound / Quasimodo unit generator for "a" or "k" rate output, of an "industrial" quality, rather than "analytical" grade. Industrial or technical grade nitric acid specifies it being of a particular minimum and approximate strength. Analytical grade specifies exactly its strength and the tolerance for that specification, as well as noting the maximum permissible levels of the most important contaminants. Such parameters would be "i" rate: set at the start of the ugen's instantiate, not changeable over time. So specifying a lower limit frequency limit of the pink quality of the noise would result in that boundary being set to the nearest octave, not precisely.
It is possible to conceive of a pink noise generator with "k" rate control of level, upper and lower boundary frequencies and the slopes of those boundaries. In this way, precise control over the noise frequency distribution could be achieved without changing the RMS level of the noise. I will leave this idea for now, but it would be mighty handy!
Filtering white noise to make it pink[/b]
The simplest DSP filters are -6dB/octave. However, a DSP or analogue electronic low pass filter with a -3dB/octave response is (or rather, was) a rare beast indeed. Here are three filters which do the job. (Paul Kellet contributed two earlier filters to those listed here.)
Such a filter would be fed with white noise to produce pink, within certain limits of accuracy.
Below the algorithms is Allan Herriman's graphical analysis of the response of these three filters.
The first description I am aware of is from Robert Bristow-Johnson posting to the Music-DSP list on 30 June 1998:
(This is rbj = (Red) Robert Bristow-Johnson's three pole and three zero filter.)
> "Orfanidis also mentions a clever way to get reasonably good 1/f
> noise: sum together n randh's, where each randh is running an
> octave slower than the preceding (one):"
>
> This is a reference to Sophocles Orfanidis' book "Introduction to
> Signal Processing":
>
> http://www.prenhall.com/books/esm_0132091720.html
>
> This sounds like a pretty good way to do it.
another method that Orfanidis mentions came from a comp.dsp post of mine.
it's just a simple "pinking" filter to be applied to white noise. since
the rolloff is -3 dB/octave, -6 dB/octave (1st order pole) is too steep and
0 dB/octave is too shallow.
an equiripple approximation to the ideal pinking filter can be realized by
alternating real poles with real zeros. a simple 3rd order solution that i
obtained is:
pole zero
---- ----
0.99572754 0.98443604
0.94790649 0.83392334
0.53567505 0.07568359
the response follows the ideal -3 dB/octave curve to within + or - 0.3 dB
over a 10 octave range from 0.0009*nyquist to 0.9*nyquist. probably if i
were to do it over again, i'd make it 5 poles and 4 zeros
Cosign on these. My only complaint is that the little blue light on my right speaker goes out every once in a while...
Great price, super sound, can't really be faded.
I personally rock the event 2020's and they rule. You could find a passive pair used pretty cheap and then pick up a decent little amp. You'd be killin it.
I will also say that I think the whole NS10 thing is a bit of a hype thing. Basicly if you already know how to mix on them, they work good, but if your not experienced with them, rap music can be difficult.
ALso keep in mind that its really all about learning any set of monitors you get. I still mix alot of shit first running through my little pioneer shelf system that I got for 700 bucks when I was 18. Why? Because I know it so well. ANd my mixes sound good out of it when I play them in basicly any other situation.
these are okay. but at least cop the bigger ones. The m-audio stuff is better if you wanna go this route. Plus they are less ugly.
how do they compare to the event 20/20's you all are talking about?
these are looking really nice right now....
the specs seem to be on point for what i'm looking for.
yeah, i've been rocking the m-audio 6 inch joints for 5 years now. I'm able to mix down pretty well with these, but the only thing is that I'm starting to realize that I need to over compensate for my low frequencies because having a 6 inch monitor does not accurately give you the range that other systems will have.
These are what I rock, defintely worth the dough.
I've got an old pair of Event PS6s. They do the job for powered monitors, but I'm sure there are better/cheaper powereds, like the Alesis models. 20/20s are the shit though, if you have the money go for it. And yes--if you go passive make sure you spend the bulk of your money on a clean amp.
I've been using those for a little under a year now...I'm definitely a fan. I don't know how they compare to the 20/20s, but I'm quite happy with them. They sound nice and clean and have a good low-end bump.