[PRODUCTION] Can you hear me now?!?!

Monitoring is defiantly one of the most important things in your studio aside from all your fancy compressors, gates, eq’s, whatever. If your monitors sound like crap, then your mix is going to sound like crap and the end result will be crap and your “fans” will hate you for your crap project *sneer*. With that said, it’s important to get every part of your signal chain, in and out, as close to perfect as you and your wallet can get. Sadly, like yours truly, not all of us own the collateral to create our dream studio with a huge AMEX Rembrandt inline mixer with Pro Tools HD (prefer Nuendo), Manley, and API gear. So we can only go so far.

In my case, the situation is, I want to upgrade my monitor set from the KRK Rokit 5’s and Event 5's to something else. Now the Rokit 5’s are nice speakers for a start. You may even be able to get nice mixes off em, hell I still use em and my mixes come out pretty well. However, you’ll be working hard on those highs and forget about your lows. On the low end they really tend to exaggerate your bass and the highs don’t seem to translate very well. To compensate I’ve acquired some Event 5’s which I use for my Hi frequency monitoring since the low end is little to nill (you don’t get much below 58Hz on the KRK's). Though for $300 for the KRK’s and $300 for the Event pairs, they did perform in accordance to their price range. In terms of what I had to do to compensate for the exaggerated bass, I took a mix that I knew how was mixed or was supposed to perform, played it in my DAW, and attenuated the signal coming in to the point where I thought I was listening to this properly (or almost properly anyway). I made a note on where these exaggerations occur and reference that note when I start mixing.



One mistake not to make is to mix on all four speakers like I used to. If you’re going to have 4 or 6 speakers to monitor a stereo mix (in regards to project studios) one set should be your mains (even though they are near fields), another your “B” reference, and if you have 6 (which in general can be crappy PC Mono speakers), they’ll be your “C “for low grade performance (like for people who still have monophonic televisions and such).

So now I’m going shopping for a better pair of speakers.Here’s the question that I’m faced with. What is the most ideal monitor to get that will not overdo the bass in my small room, but will still translate well enough for a great mix? Obviously monitoring true low bass requires some serious power and money and frankly for a project studio is not necessary. If you can get enough and that signal is as accurate as possible (unlike the KRK’s heh) then you’ll be ok, hence my dilemma between the ADAM Audio A7’s, the ADAM Audio P11A’s, or something else.


















We’ll go more into detail about this dilemma next time!