Monitoring Secrets

If your monitors are the weakest link in your studio, you’re undoubtedly putting the quality of your mixes in jeopardy. Mark Cousins offers some essential advice.

If you’ve ever struggled to mix or record using a pair of cheap hi-fi speakers, the transition to a professional set of studio monitors can often be a revelation, providing levels of clarity, depth and detail that enable you to produce immediately better results. Put simply, a good set of monitors can transform the way you work, enabling you to dissect even the most complicated of mixes, as well as ensuring that your music translates well across a range of different playback systems, from car stereos to upmarket hi-fis. It’s no surprise, therefore, that professional studios spend tens of thousands of pounds on farfield monitors, or that engineers closely ally themselves to a trusted set of nearfields.

Monitor minefield
The process of choosing the right pair of monitors – and getting the best from them – isn’t as straightforward as it may first appear. What exactly should you be looking for in a good pair of monitors? Should you be swayed by an impressive sound when you audition them in-store or should you stay loyal to a set monitors that provides a truthful and honest performance? Equally, once you get your new purchases home, there’s plenty to be considered in respect to optimising their performance, from the latest developments in room correction from the likes of KRK and IK Multimedia to areas such as acoustic treatment – and, of course, the optimal placement of your monitors.

Feel the difference
Appreciating the differences between a pair of domestic hi-fi speakers and a dedicated set of high-performance studio monitors is essential to understanding why monitors are so crucial to recording and mixing. Even more important is understanding how they will affect your workflow. Ultimately, a hi-fi speaker is designed to favour an exciting listening experience, but often at the expense of the integrity of the audio it’s presented with. In many cases, this design philosophy equates to a ‘hyped’ sound – pumping up the bass and pushing the treble (sometimes leaving a large hole in the mid-range) to create the allure of a good recording rather than an accurate portrayal of what you’re presented with.
By contrast, a truly professional set of monitors tend to be far less flattering, but equally, far more detailed and accurate. The bass, for example, might not fill the room, but you’ll hear a more structured version of the low end of your mix, with a clear distinction between its constituent parts. Equally, the high end, although perhaps not as sharp as a pair of hi-fi speakers (which tend to be hyped around 10kHz), will extend accurately over the 10–20kHz range, enabling you to better discern the different qualities between the ‘air’ of acoustic guitar picking, for example, or the breath of a vocal take.
Although we’ve largely picked up on frequency issues, it’s also important to remember some other sonic differences between hi-fi speakers and studio monitors. The improved depth and imaging, for example, will enable you to better negotiate your soundstage, giving a more informed sense of what sits at the back of your mix (reverb tails, for example) rather than just the instrumentation sitting upfront. Good monitors will also better convey information concerning the relative left-to-right pan positioning. Another important area is the transient detail in your mix (particularly from percussive sounds), that can all too easily get lost because of a speaker’s sluggish reactions (or, indeed, poor distortion characteristics from a mismatched amplifier).

On the level
Given these differences, it’s interesting to note the specific effects monitoring has on your sonic output. Obviously, with a clearer overall sound and improved distinction between instruments you’ll be able to make more informed decisions about your signal processing, whether it’s equalisation, compression or even part levelling. Surprisingly, this might actually lead to you adopting gentler, more refined settings – less gain reduction on a compressor, for example, or just +/-2dB of equalisation – because you can identify and perceive the results more easily. Even areas such as a compressor’s attack and release settings – once impossible to distinguish through cheap speakers – suddenly become as clear as day.
The other interesting factor to note is the inverse relation between a monitor’s frequency response (especially when it’s not linear) and your eventual audio output. For example, although it’s flattering and arguably more enjoyable to work with a set of bottom-heavy speakers if you’re a fan of bass, the hype that they offer ultimately results in a finished recording that could be deficient in low frequencies. Conversely, a more neutral set of monitors that offer a flat response (although possibly less inspiring to actually compose with) will ultimately help guide you to produce a mix that is equal and effective across the entire frequency spectrum.

Active lifestyle
Having understood some of the sound reasons for choosing dedicated monitoring over hi-fi speakers, let’s take a closer look at the technology involved and the key features you should be looking for in a pair of studio monitors. One distinction is the difference between passive monitors (which are driven by an amplifier that’s separate from the speakers) and active monitors (these have both the amplifier and speaker in the same ‘box’). Of course, active monitors have been widely accepted as the standard for studio monitoring, but is this just a case of convenience or are there any real benefits to the design?
Much of the technical and sonic differences between active and passive monitors is how sound is distributed between the drivers – the woofer and tweeter, in other words. In a passive setup, the signal is amplified first and then passed through passive electronics to split the signal into its two constituent frequency bands (low and high) for the woofer and tweeter respectively. By contrast, a good bi-amplified active monitor will use an active crossover to first split the signal into the two constituent components – which are amplified individually – and then onto the appropriate driver.
Although rather more complicated in design, this bi-amplified approach is often far more respectful to frequencies around the difficult crossover point between the woofer and tweeter. A poorly designed passive speaker, for example, will often exhibit large holes in one of the most important frequency areas of a mix – around 2kHz – which can lead to some disastrous placement or levelling decisions for snares and vocals. By contrast, a carefully designed and manufactured set of active monitors with a precisely aligned crossover will enable you to extract far more information from the mid-range of the mix. It’s also highly likely that you’ll have some form of bass and treble contouring controls (changing the relative driver levels), enabling you to fine-tune your monitor’s performance either to your room’s acoustic or to your own personal preference.
Beyond the essentials of the electronics, there are plenty of apparent differences in areas such as the material used for the various drivers and the design of the cabinet itself. Woven Kevlar woofers – a concept originally pursued by KRK – are stronger, more durable and offer faster performance than equivalent paper woofers and are increasingly being adopted by manufacturers. German company Adam also seems to be leading the way in respect to its own ribbon tweeter technology, which theoretically offers a faster response time to high-frequency transient energy. Across all manufacturers, cabinets also seem to have become more rounded to reduce diffraction distortion, ultimately highlighting how monitor technology continues to evolve and improve.

Best of bass
One big growth area in monitoring has been the rise of systems utilising a third, additional subwoofer alongside the two main monitors. The development of the subwoofer system is two-fold: partially as a means of addressing our need for bass (especially below 60Hz), but equally, in response to the growing number of desktop-based mini monitors (such as Genelec’s 6010s) that really need a subwoofer to effectively articulate the bottom end of a mix. However, should a subwoofer really be considered essential, especially for those using a larger set of nearfields?
There’s no doubt that an effectively set up and positioned subwoofer can help pin down problematic frequency content below 60Hz, although a poorly configured system can also confuse issues just as much. Most subwoofers are connected in-line with your main monitors – that’s to say, your control signal (or monitor mix) first enters the active subwoofer then gets passed onto your two main monitors. The reason for this routing is to allow for some level of bass management – rolling off frequencies above a given point (usually around 80Hz) on the subwoofer using a low-pass filter, then high-pass-filtering the main monitors so that they don’t double up in this frequency area.

Making choices
Having taken all these factors into account, you should now have a more informed understanding of monitor speakers and what you should be looking for in a ‘perfect’ set of monitors. The final decision, though, always seems to involve balancing an intuitive response to the monitors that deliver the most pleasing and musical output and a technical understanding of how the design and sound of the monitors might positively (or negatively) affect your working process. It’s always interesting to note, though, that your own personal preference has to play a big part in this decision – what one engineer might consider to be the perfect monitor, another will consider almost impossible to work with.
As you’re testing and evaluating a set of monitors (either in-store or in the confines of your own studio) take time to appreciate their individual qualities rather than just quickly switching between them. A good spread of reference tracks also helps – possibly including both your own material as well as some well-recorded commercial tracks – to build up a more complete profile of how the speakers cope with different genres and sounds. Better still, work with the monitors if you can; this will enable you to directly hear how they affect the multitude of decisions you make when recording, mixing or mastering.
Obviously, the points that you should be assessing relate directly to the benefits and qualities that we previously discussed. Looking at the frequency response, for example, try decoding the various components of the mix and how well the monitors articulate each sound within it. The bass, for example, should favour a clear, well-defined sound rather than simply sounding deep, while treble should extend without sounding too pushed. However, you should also spend just as much time (if not more) evaluating the all-important mid-range performance: are there any obvious holes around the crossover point, are the vocals clear and easy to distinguish, and do the monitors hinder or aid you negotiating this often overcrowded part of the mix?

Never-ending journey
Even if you’ve managed to arrive at a decision as regards your favourite monitors, the quest for an optimal listening environment is far from over. Even the best pair of monitors require the right placement, acoustic treatment and so on to get the best from them, so it’s well worth getting to grips with the other issues explored in this feature to ensure that your new monitors are working optimally and that any existing monitors are delivering the goods. Although at times the differences in sound quality can be subtle, you’ll ultimately reap big dividends in terms of the quality of your audio output – improvements that more than justify the time and money you’ve spent.

This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 68
Filed under Home, General Features, Features

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