Tech: Do I need "monitors" to record? Can't I use my stereo speakers?
Q: I'm just getting into recording at home. What's so different about "monitors" from regular speakers? Don't they all do the same thing?
A: I kinda though you were kidding us around, too, but it looks like you're actually just getting started about to do some home recording, so let me just give you my thumbnail on this:
Consumer/home speakers come in many varieties and quality levels, as you probably have notice. Some have a lot of bass, some don't. Some handle the treble well. Some don't. Some are skewed this way. Some that way.
When you're mixing, generally accepted practice (not cut in stone but generally accepted) is to use accurate, neutral speakers with as flat an EQ response curve as possible (see my bit on the environment/room below).
You don't want them to have exaggerated, overly loud treble, for instance, since if they do, you'll have a tendency when mixing to push treble instruments down in the mix or maybe engage "corrective" EQ -- but you'd actually be "correcting" for problems in your speaker/mix environment.
Say you were mixing on a big ol' pair of consumer boomers, hyped sizzly highs and uneven bass that booms out in the upper bass range (where it's easy to move some air) and is missing down low where the actual bass note fundamentals may be. The result is that notes in certain ranges boom out and other notes disappear. (It's the sound of several generations of home music players.)
If you were mixing on those, you'd be likely to be compensating for the bumpily uneven response of those speakers. If they were hyped on the top and boomy in parts of the bass range, you might EQ in compensation for that, pushing some parts of the bass and pulling down others, pulling down the high end... and if you then play your mix on a good, flat system, it sounds dull on the high end and boomy in different parts of the bass range.
Worse, if you play your mix on some other consumer system that is equally tonally skewed -- but in different places, you could end up with the uneveness of your mix compounding with the unevenness of the listener's speakers and have a mess twice as bad as on the flat monitors. (But at least it would still sound 'good' on your original mix monitors. If you could buy a pair of those for all your fans...
)
Now, why do so many people use near field monitors -- and how are they different?
Basically NFMs tend to be smaller speakers, typically with an 8" woofer or smaller. They're designed to be as flat as possible, at least down to the bottom of their bass extension, where theys will hopefully roll off gracefully. Some NFM's barely get down below 80 or 90 Hz. Others can go down almost flat into the 30s. Some folks like to use a pair of relatively flat monitors (like my Event 20/20bas) and a pair of 'spotlight' or 'magnifying glass' monitors like the famous/infamous Yamaha NS10m's that have gone from costing a few hun a pair when they were made to pulling down exaggerated amounts on eBay from folks swayed by a handful of famous producers who 'swear by' their NS10m's. The Yamahas are sadly wonting in bass (when run flat) and have an uncharitable high end emphasis -- but that seems to work out quite well for some folks. Me, I mixed on my pair for a few years and got some good mixes -- except that as I got more into styles with really low bass (particularly synthesized bass) I found the Yamahas -- which fall off rapidly under 80-90 Hz -- were just blind to it and so I added the Events (near flat to the high 30s).
One important thing about NFMs: while most consumer speakers are designed for a broad treble dispersion, to spread the sweet spot, NFMs are mostly designed to have narrow dispersion -- so as to not send treble out to the side where it can bounce off the side walls and come reach the engineer in his sweet spot early enough that they are not heard by the ear/auditory nerve system as separate sounds but rather are 'combined' in such a way as to distort and mask the direct sound you should be going by.
And that brings us to the monitoring enironment, the room.
Your speakers are crucial -- but so is the room.
They form a system.
Let's deal with the 'easy part' first. We already talked about side or 'early' reflections. In addition to tight dispersion on your NFMs, you want to put absorptive material (dedicated acoustic panels expensive but good ones cut reflections in a wide frequency range. Still, the right, loosely folded drapes can go a ways to help. A good rule of thumb is that sound reflects in much the same way that light reflects. High frequencies tend to be more directional. A given fabric might absorb some frequencies while bouncing other ranges. Soft, fuzzy, losely folded drapes probably work best at that end of things. But acoustic panels get the job done very well. They're not cheap but they may well be worth it. (Shop. But remember, they're not all the same. And those mattress pads at target may work somewhat in some ranges but... well... if nothing else... they're flammable. Still, I've used them in a pinch, even used to create ad hoc vocal booths out of them. (They don't shut out outside sound at all, really, but they can absorb a certain amount of reflection in the vocal range. They get pingy in the higher ranges, mid-treble and up, though. Put a set of cymbals where the sound can bounce off a mattres pad wall and you can often hear the ping of the reflection from the cymbals. Sorry... enough about trailer trash acoustic treatments. )
So, absorb on the sides. Absorp in the back behind the mixer/engineer. But a common design practice is to have a 'live' end in front of the engineer (behind his monitors -- where the studio floor window would be in a classic set up). The thinking is that direct sound from the speakers going past the engineer is absorbed to some extent by the 'dead end' and the 'live end' is relatively harmless or even beneficial, though, frankly, the logic on that has always escaped me, a little. Suffice it to say that there's no direct sound hitting the live end behind the speakers.
But... that's the easy part.
The hard part is bass.
Because most of us are in rooms with parallel walls, bass from the sound bouncing, essentially, back and forth between the two parallel walls in such a way that certain notes combine to get louder while others end up having phase cancellation issues and get softer... These resonance peaks can be extremely pronounced in an untreated room, causing variations from 10-15 dB in a somewhat treated room from just moving a mic a few inches -- to well above 40 dB in an untreated room. We use what are called bass traps to help break up these standing waves.
Anhow, acoustic treatment is way too complex to get into here. But just remember that monitors are only half the equation. A bad room will make it almost impossible to avoid bad mixes.
A: I kinda though you were kidding us around, too, but it looks like you're actually just getting started about to do some home recording, so let me just give you my thumbnail on this:
Consumer/home speakers come in many varieties and quality levels, as you probably have notice. Some have a lot of bass, some don't. Some handle the treble well. Some don't. Some are skewed this way. Some that way.
When you're mixing, generally accepted practice (not cut in stone but generally accepted) is to use accurate, neutral speakers with as flat an EQ response curve as possible (see my bit on the environment/room below).
You don't want them to have exaggerated, overly loud treble, for instance, since if they do, you'll have a tendency when mixing to push treble instruments down in the mix or maybe engage "corrective" EQ -- but you'd actually be "correcting" for problems in your speaker/mix environment.
Say you were mixing on a big ol' pair of consumer boomers, hyped sizzly highs and uneven bass that booms out in the upper bass range (where it's easy to move some air) and is missing down low where the actual bass note fundamentals may be. The result is that notes in certain ranges boom out and other notes disappear. (It's the sound of several generations of home music players.)
If you were mixing on those, you'd be likely to be compensating for the bumpily uneven response of those speakers. If they were hyped on the top and boomy in parts of the bass range, you might EQ in compensation for that, pushing some parts of the bass and pulling down others, pulling down the high end... and if you then play your mix on a good, flat system, it sounds dull on the high end and boomy in different parts of the bass range.
Worse, if you play your mix on some other consumer system that is equally tonally skewed -- but in different places, you could end up with the uneveness of your mix compounding with the unevenness of the listener's speakers and have a mess twice as bad as on the flat monitors. (But at least it would still sound 'good' on your original mix monitors. If you could buy a pair of those for all your fans...
)Now, why do so many people use near field monitors -- and how are they different?
Basically NFMs tend to be smaller speakers, typically with an 8" woofer or smaller. They're designed to be as flat as possible, at least down to the bottom of their bass extension, where theys will hopefully roll off gracefully. Some NFM's barely get down below 80 or 90 Hz. Others can go down almost flat into the 30s. Some folks like to use a pair of relatively flat monitors (like my Event 20/20bas) and a pair of 'spotlight' or 'magnifying glass' monitors like the famous/infamous Yamaha NS10m's that have gone from costing a few hun a pair when they were made to pulling down exaggerated amounts on eBay from folks swayed by a handful of famous producers who 'swear by' their NS10m's. The Yamahas are sadly wonting in bass (when run flat) and have an uncharitable high end emphasis -- but that seems to work out quite well for some folks. Me, I mixed on my pair for a few years and got some good mixes -- except that as I got more into styles with really low bass (particularly synthesized bass) I found the Yamahas -- which fall off rapidly under 80-90 Hz -- were just blind to it and so I added the Events (near flat to the high 30s).
One important thing about NFMs: while most consumer speakers are designed for a broad treble dispersion, to spread the sweet spot, NFMs are mostly designed to have narrow dispersion -- so as to not send treble out to the side where it can bounce off the side walls and come reach the engineer in his sweet spot early enough that they are not heard by the ear/auditory nerve system as separate sounds but rather are 'combined' in such a way as to distort and mask the direct sound you should be going by.
And that brings us to the monitoring enironment, the room.
Your speakers are crucial -- but so is the room.
They form a system.
Let's deal with the 'easy part' first. We already talked about side or 'early' reflections. In addition to tight dispersion on your NFMs, you want to put absorptive material (dedicated acoustic panels expensive but good ones cut reflections in a wide frequency range. Still, the right, loosely folded drapes can go a ways to help. A good rule of thumb is that sound reflects in much the same way that light reflects. High frequencies tend to be more directional. A given fabric might absorb some frequencies while bouncing other ranges. Soft, fuzzy, losely folded drapes probably work best at that end of things. But acoustic panels get the job done very well. They're not cheap but they may well be worth it. (Shop. But remember, they're not all the same. And those mattress pads at target may work somewhat in some ranges but... well... if nothing else... they're flammable. Still, I've used them in a pinch, even used to create ad hoc vocal booths out of them. (They don't shut out outside sound at all, really, but they can absorb a certain amount of reflection in the vocal range. They get pingy in the higher ranges, mid-treble and up, though. Put a set of cymbals where the sound can bounce off a mattres pad wall and you can often hear the ping of the reflection from the cymbals. Sorry... enough about trailer trash acoustic treatments.
)So, absorb on the sides. Absorp in the back behind the mixer/engineer. But a common design practice is to have a 'live' end in front of the engineer (behind his monitors -- where the studio floor window would be in a classic set up). The thinking is that direct sound from the speakers going past the engineer is absorbed to some extent by the 'dead end' and the 'live end' is relatively harmless or even beneficial, though, frankly, the logic on that has always escaped me, a little. Suffice it to say that there's no direct sound hitting the live end behind the speakers.
But... that's the easy part.
The hard part is bass.
Because most of us are in rooms with parallel walls, bass from the sound bouncing, essentially, back and forth between the two parallel walls in such a way that certain notes combine to get louder while others end up having phase cancellation issues and get softer... These resonance peaks can be extremely pronounced in an untreated room, causing variations from 10-15 dB in a somewhat treated room from just moving a mic a few inches -- to well above 40 dB in an untreated room. We use what are called bass traps to help break up these standing waves.
Anhow, acoustic treatment is way too complex to get into here. But just remember that monitors are only half the equation. A bad room will make it almost impossible to avoid bad mixes.
posted by TK Major at
8:48 AM
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