Choosing And Using Monitors

It’s simple, right? Buy yourself a set of expensive monitors and your mixes will sound great. In fact, choosing a monitoring system requires a little more thought than that, as Huw Price explains...

Walk into any studio throughout the 1980s and early 1990s and you probably would have found the engineer and producer huddled around a small pair of black ash boxes with white woofers. Originally designed as a bookshelf domestic hi-fi speaker, the Yamaha NS10 became a ubiquitous presence in the recording profession.

So they must have been ‘really good’? Well, technically no. They had very little bottom end, the mid-range was too forward and emphasised, while the high end was so rough and fatiguing that many studio pros, this writer included, resorted to the thoroughly unprofessional solution of taping toilet paper over the tweeter. It wasn’t as if they were too bright – in fact, they could sound dull – they were just hard work.

Those old-school engineers weren’t out of their minds – not all the time, anyway – because NS10s were a mixed bag. They could generate high volumes so they were well suited to tracking up in the control room and their mid-range emphasis enabled you to hear tuning issues when overdubbing vocals and guitars with ease (far better, in fact, than many of the more ‘accurate’ full-range monitors that eventually ousted them).

Most studio mixes were being made with domestic hi-fi systems in mind rather than club sound systems. Since NS10s were originally designed for home use, they could give you a fair idea of how your mixes would sound to a punter. After all, the bottom line is that your mixes have to translate – that is, sound decent on other systems not just in your studio. If you could achieve a clear, well balanced mix on a pair of NS10s, nine times out of ten it would sound just fine elsewhere – even on expensive speakers.

Information versus entertainment
That last statement might seem odd, but great speakers can make poor mixes sound worse rather than better. Hi-fi speakers are designed to sound ‘nice’, whereas decent studio monitors should be designed to inform. So if your mix is pants, it will sound pants on any decent set of studio monitors.

It works the other way round, too. Since it’s often easier to hear low-level details and achieve mix clarity with top-of-the-range speakers, you might not put enough effort into bringing out these elements. So when you play your mixes on a home system, all those subtle delays and finely crafted reverbs could vanish completely.

Driver technology
Loudspeakers are the last link in the chain, where recorded music re-enters the physical world. Essentially they work like microphones in reverse – they turn electrical energy back into sound waves. There are three main categories of microphone and three common driver technologies and they all date from a similar era.

Rice & Kellog (no, we’re not having a laugh) are credited with producing the first moving-coil loudspeaker in 1927 and they are still the most common variety of drive unit used today. Various materials are used for the actual speaker cone including paper pulp, aluminium and plastic.

Moving-coil tweeters are the norm, too, with soft fabric domes or metal domes. Of course, it comes down to personal preference, but some people find metal-dome tweeters hard going over prolonged periods of time. Ribbon microphones are very similar to moving coils, so it’s not surprising that foil ribbons are also used in drivers – mostly for upper-mid and high-frequency applications. They used to be quite expensive and esoteric, but Samson is now making affordable ribbon tweeter monitors.

Electrostatic monitors are the loudspeaker equivalent of the condenser microphone. Many engineers, particularly those who work in the classical field, swear by them because no energy is wasted as heat and they exhibit very low distortion. In fact, some novices conclude that they lack high frequencies, but in reality they are probably just missing the distortion they’re used to hearing from moving coils. However, electrostatic speakers can sound bass-light and some people prefer to use them with a subwoofer. They are also dipoles – firing front and back – so they are best used in larger rooms, well away from rear walls.

Active or passive?
Passive loudspeakers are powered by external amplifiers. The drivers in active monitors are driven by individual on-board amplifiers that are built-in to the cabinet. Besides eliminating the need for speaker cables and saving lots of space, this arrangement makes it easier for designers to control low frequency damping and distortion. The frequency crossover can be done at line level using smaller, less expensive components and since each driver has its own amplifier, matching drive units of similar sensitivity becomes less crucial. Manufacturers can also install corrective equalisation to help the user match the speakers to the acoustic environment.

Testing and evaluation
Before you can make any meaningful assessment of a pair of speakers, you need to set them up properly. Both speakers will need to be positioned at the same height and the tweeters should be the same height as your ears when you are in your usual working position. Although you’ll often see speakers placed on their sides in studios, they are designed to work upright and they sound better that way. Your working position should be exactly in the middle of the speakers and you will need to listen carefully to determine the correct amount of toe-in.

Play a well mixed track and listen to the lead vocal. It should sit squarely in the middle of the mix. If it sounds a little vague, turn each speaker towards the centre by a couple of centimetres until the vocal gains a bit of solidity. Keep making small adjustments until you achieve a solid vocal with the widest possible stereo image. The amount of toe-in will vary depending on your listening distance and the speakers themselves. Keep all speakers as far away as possible from walls and corners. You might have noticed that when we are reviewing monitors, we often refer to the same tracks. Believe it or not we listen to lots of different types of music, but it always helps to assess an unfamiliar monitoring system with familiar material.

Most pro engineers carry around a selection of known CDs to help them understand an unknown room and its monitors. A sparse track that has a very deep bass line with few overtones will tell you a lot with the bottom end. We use a Polly Harvey track called Working For The Man. On some systems the lowest note virtually disappears and since it is quite a pure synth-like tone, any
low-frequency distortion is easy to detect. It’s also important that the low frequencies retain their musical content. This writer was involved with a Depeche Mode remix a few years back and the producer took a mono sample of the original bass line. Throughout the remix we could hear that something wasn’t right, but we couldn’t pin down anything specific. Eventually we moved to a bigger control room with ATC monitors and we instantly realised that the bass line was out of tune. The original was in stereo and the two sides were harmonised up and down with an auto panning effect averaging everything to concert pitch in the centre. The boomy speakers in the smaller control room, that all the jungle and hip hop crews loved, were just mushing out in the low end. There was plenty of bass, but you couldn’t hear any note. So listen for the quality of the bottom end not the quantity.

A properly mastered CD can also help you assess the high-frequency balance and the amount of coloration in the mid-range. If you’re working in various studios or you’re trying out monitors in shops with a view to buy, make yourself a compilation CD with mixes that you trust and take it around with you. Pretty soon you’ll be assessing speakers confidently and quickly – just like a pro. Unfortunately, you can’t rely solely on listening tests with CDs. There are plenty of speakers that are great to listen to, but hard to work with when you are mixing. What’s more, the speakers might perform very differently in your studio to in the shop. If you’re allowed a trial period, try living with them for a while before committing to buy. If you aren’t allowed to take them home, take a laptop to the shop with a pre-recorded backing track and try balancing up a few mixes on various speakers. Keep it simple; use the stereo outs from your computer or soundcard and keep effects and EQ to a minimum. Record each mix as an internal bounce and label them with the name of the monitors they were mixed on. At home you can compile a CD with all the mixes and play them on as many systems as possible – in your studio, in friends’ studios, in your car and so on.You’re checking how well they translate. Keep a score and the eventual winner will be the mix that sounds the best on the widest variety of monitoring systems. But be warned, the speakers that win out might not be the ones you liked best in the shop.

Even the finest monitors will take some getting used to – there will be a learning period where you acclimatise to their foibles, subtleties and peculiarities. It’s probably another reason why NS10s became so popular. They sounded the same everywhere – truly the Big Mac of studio monitors.

How much does it matter?
Struggling to create ‘perfect’ mixes can mean that you spend too much time on them and you lose all the spontaneity and freshness. This is why producers often end up struggling to improve on a midnight reference mix they made to have a quick listen at home or back at the hotel. Many of these quick mixes have ended up making it onto finished CDs.

If you’re getting your mix professionally mastered, you might be better off going for a great vibe and leaving it to the mastering engineer to iron out the wrinkles. Your priorities will be different if you have to do your own mastering. Frequency balance and accuracy will be far more critical because there are no outside ears to sort everything out.

Whatever your budget and your working methods, you should always strive to get your speakers and room working together and produce the most balanced mixes you can. But never let yourself get bogged down in the technicalities at the expense of getting on with the sheer pleasure of making music.

This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 36
Filed under General Features

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