Recording - November 2012 - 8

Note to faithful writers: When sending your letters by email, please remember to include your name and where you hail from.
Pretty isn’t always good Let me start by saying how much I’ve enjoyed reading your magazine over the last 3 years. I’ve created a small studio in my basement where I’ve been learning the ins and outs of recording (at least at an amateur level). I’ve taken a lot of your advice and found it very useful. I have a question regarding monitors. I have been looking for an inexpensive pair of small monitors to use while mixing and to date, have not found anything that works (or in one case, works for more than a week!). In the meantime, I have set up an old Sony receiver with a couple of old but nice-sounding passive hi-fi speakers (Advents from the 1970s) as well as the usual small Logitech computer speakers. I quite like the sound out of the Advents and will A/B between the computer speakers and the hi-fi during the mixing process. The Sony eq is set flat to try to keep the sound neutral. Is this a usable setup? Or is the Sony/speaker set up likely to be biased in some way? All the routing is handled through an Alesis USB mixer. Since you stress in many, many articles that it is important to mix (and master) using some quality monitors and to be able to A/B different speakers. I wondered if you could give an opinion on my setup. Thanks,
Phil Holmes Walkerton, ON

You should also invest in a good pair of headphones if you don’t have them. Mixing on headphones is not ideal for things like panning choices and listening to reverb settings, but for checking low end it is a great solution if you can’t afford, or don’t have room for, large speakers. Getting a better pair of monitors is a very good idea, but beware the words “inexpensive” and “small”. Cheap monitors that claim to be flat when they’re not are worse than no monitors at all, and small monitors, even good ones, will not reliably tell you what your low end sounds like. Adding a subwoofer gives you lots of bass and can be critical for certain types of mixing, but mixing with a sub presents its own challenges as it is very difficult to line up the sub with your other speakers so it’s not giving you way too much or too little bass. In my opinion, if you can’t manage good big monitors and a room that can handle them, the best solution is a combination of small- to medium-sized reference monitors, good headphones with strong bass extension, and as many other speakers as you can listen to: your Logitechs, your Advents, earbuds, car stereos, anything. Learn to tweak your mixes so they sound good anywhere you take them. It seems impossible but it can be done, and it is one of the hardest but most rewarding talents a recording musician can learn. Good luck and thanks for reading!—MM Lorenz Rychner adds: Phil, thanks for writing. I saw Mike Metlay’s reply and I concur. Let me add: The Advents are likely to have a smiley curve, and, worse, the 40-year old materials in the speakers are likely to have deteriorated some, making for slower transient response and possibly other ills. Retire them to a room where you or others listen noncritically to nice music, since they still sound “nice”. Nice is not what you want here—you want brutally honest. If a sample of, say, a triangle bites your eardrum through really good (!) headphones, then your Advents should also bite your eardrum. They probably won’t. Can you tell an oboe from an English horn on the Advents? A bass clarinet from a bassoon in the middle of a dense mix of a modern orchestral piece with lots going on? Those things are giveaways. Getting a pair of such studio-worthy monitor speakers doesn’t have to cost the earth. Did you see my review of the Equator D5 model (December 2011)? Still $299 for a pair, direct only, and they’ll take them back if you really are not happy—check out www.equatoraudio.com/D5_Studio_Monitors_with_DSP_300_ Pair_p/d5.htm There are others, as reviewed in many recent issues of Recording. Just as important is the location. Make sure to have no surface between your ears and the speakers, and that’s not easy to do in many cases. But try, because any splash from a surface (like a tabletop, a mixer surface, etc.) creates havoc. Tweeters at ear level, equilateral distance (a triangle of equal distances from ears to speakers and from speaker to speaker), not too far, not too close, and no interfering surfaces. Good luck!—LzR

Mike Metlay replies: Phil: Thanks so much for your letter! You note that your Advents are nice sounding hi-fi speakers. I’ll bet that what makes them “nice sounding” is a set of bumps and dips in the frequency response that sound good to your ears. Those bumps and dips are built into the speaker itself, either accidentally or by design, and setting your Sony amp flat won’t remove them. They are in everything the speakers play back, and when you mix, they influence what you hear. If a speaker has a bump at a particular frequency, sounds in that range won’t sound “right” unless they’re mixed too soft (because the speaker is making up the rest for you), and if a speaker has a dip, then sounds must be mixed too loud to compensate. I speak from experience here. When I built my first home studio in the early 1980s, I started with my hifi as a monitoring system, and moved as quickly as possible to a set of Tannoy nearfield monitors because of how “off” my mixes turned out. All is not lost, though: as you’ve realized, the secret here is to check your work on many different speakers and hear where the problems are. You already have desktop computer speakers, a useful check reference since many people use them and they either have way too much sloppy one-note bass (if they’re mated to a subwoofer for gaming explosions) or no bass at all (if they’re alone).

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RECORDING November 2012

http://www.equatoraudio.com/D5_Studio_Monitors_with_DSP_300_Pair_p/d5.htm http://www.equatoraudio.com/D5_Studio_Monitors_with_DSP_300_Pair_p/d5.htm

Recording - November 2012

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