So some of the cheaper M-Audio and Yamaha would just be a wast of money? Here is a Yamaha I am looking at. Is this just a 'loudspeaker'?

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/Yamaha-MSP3-Active-2Way-Studio-MonitorEach?sku=600848

In case it makes any difference, I pretty much am only doing orchestral music. I am willing to pay the extra money (the exo seems to be around $350) if it is going to make a huge difference. Just want to be sure before doing it. Thanks for the advice.

Colin Thomson

Also I want to be sure that the Blue Sky Exo will work with my setup without other materiel needed. I already linked the sound card that is coming. I only saw digital inputs in the exo. Am I missing something? I am not sure that the soundcard I got will have digital out. I thought audio out was all I was going to need. I just really want to know that this is all going to work together before I buy it. Thanks.

Colin Thomson 

I don't think the EXO has digital inputs at all. But in any case, there will be analogue inputs that fit your needs 😉

The best idea would be to go to their own forum at www.abluesky.com und ask them directly!

HTH,

/Dietz

@ColinThomson said:

 So some of the cheaper M-Audio and Yamaha would just be a wast of money? Here is a Yamaha I am looking at. Is this just a 'loudspeaker'?

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/Yamaha-MSP3-Active-2Way-Studio-MonitorEach?sku=600848

[...]

Hmmm ... Yamaha makes good stuff since many years, but I'm almost sure the little EXOs would beat the MSP3 in a 1:1-comparison. But the best way to find out is to go to the dealer of your choice and ask him to give you a demo-pair of each for a test in your own environment.

All right. Thanks for all the info Dietz. I will probably be buying in the next day or two. If anyone else has thoughts or experience, please post. Thanks.

Colin Thomson 

I'd go with the Yamaha's or similar and spend the difference on treating the room a little. Will make more difference than spending more on the monitors :)

Have a read here: http://www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html for some ideas. 

Thanks for the link, Ianwuk. I had actually already been reading through that. Very interesting. I did end up ordering the Blue Audio EXO setup. I read enough reviews to convince me to spend the extra. But I certainly hope to at least help out the acoustics of my room sometime in the near future. Thanks for all the advice.

Colin Thomson 

No worries Colin, I hope they work out well for you :)

I'm glad you found my post "amusing" Nick. I never said anything about Ethan Winer being anything. The page I linked to, whoever wrote it, has some useful information on why room acoustics are important.  

If we were talking about $200 vs $2000 monitors I might agree that the "really good" monitors would be better than room treatment, but in a low price bracket I'd say room is more important...especially if you are sticking a sub in there. 

I'm no expert and don't profess to be, however, I DID buy expensive monitors and put them in an untreated room a few years back. I had all sorts of problems with the low end translating badly, and while my mixes did improve, they improved a lot more when I treated the room with a few cheap home made bass traps and some absorbtion. If the ear compensated so well, people would mix with cheap headphones and wouldn't need super flat uber yay monitors at all.

All that is of course, is my opinion, and as I said I'm no pro. Just going by my experiences :) 

My apologies, lanwuk - my post came off sounding insulting, and I didn't intend that.

I know *you* didn't say anything about Ethan Winer being anything - I'm bemused in general. Lots of people link to his site these days, just as they do to Bob Katz' site whenever something comes up about digital theory. Bob Katz happens to be an extremely knowledgeable guy and an excellent engineer; I just have a similar reaction about people referring others to his site to try and end all discussions about subtle digital issues. I've been reading about and working with this stuff for years, and I know enough about it to know that I know very little - which is way ahead of most people who post on the internet about digital audio. (Usually the giveaway is when someone writes "to properly dither" in a sentence; that hideous split infinitve is usually a cue not to listen to the rest of what they're saying. :) )

Anyway, I do stand by what I said about room acoustics: give me good speakers in a *normal* (not totally messed up) room over lousy ones in a good room. If the bass is totally screwed up to the point you're describing, then of course you need to trap it. That's not terribly difficult to do, though. You can make pretty much any room reasonably workable just by trapping the bass, and also soaking up excess reverb (preferably at the front and definitely not the sides). It's possible to work wonders without using official acoustic materials (although I have some ASC baffles up, and they're great). For stereo, that is - I'm not set up for surround and don't know about that.

Note that I'm not talking about the kind of serious room tweaking you'd do for a commercial-grade monitoring (mixing/mastering) environment. That requires a lot of work, expertise, and money - a good ten times what the kind of speakers we're talking about here run. A good friend of mine who now runs a studio in a small resort town moved there after losing his studio lease in a larger area. He literally cried when he heard the new place (which is in two rooms of his house). Several weeks and thousands of dollars later, his monitoring and tracking rooms are awesome -  although I personally happen to prefer a more live monitoring environment. But of course there isn't only one kind of room that's good for monitoring.

By the way, people making the argument for acoustic treatment usually point out that you can easily sweep and measure 15dB frequency lumps all over the place caused by the acoustics of the room. Speakers only have 3dB swings at worst, therefore fixing the room is more important.

To repeat myself: the problem with that argument is that the brain compensates for what seem like hideous problems in the room. Measurement mics are not human ears!

But I certainly don't want to argue against room treatment - we definitely agree that it's very important. 

@Nick Batzdorf said:

This new forum software makes everything come out in a single paragraph! Why?

Just thought I would check back in. The Blue Sky EXO system came and I have been using it for about a month and a half, and have no complaints whatsoever. The clarity is amazing, and it seems less and less like they are speakers. I just hear the sounds. Sometimes I wonder if they are really good, because I never think about how good they sound, but that is because they are so transparent, and tell you exactly what you have. Much better than other brand names that will make anything sound 'good'. Very highly recommended to anyone looking in that price range. As stated earlier in the thread, I was hoping for more around the $200 range, but I am glad I spent the extra $150 and got these. Also, the support on the forum is incredible. I think all of my posts got replies in less than 3 hours or so, and were very helpful. Thank you very much, Dietz, for recommending the Blue Sky EXO system to me.

Colin Thomson

Hi Dietz,

This is an old thread so you probably know the answer by now. However, it won't hurt to post a solution here for reference. When using Safari on the Mac, everything comes out as one monolithic paragraph. However, if you use Firefox (as someone suggested in another thread) the formatting works properly - so its some problem between Safari and your forum software.

btw, don't you work at Vienna? Shouldn't you be telling me this instead? [;)]

@Dietz said:

You sould see it in this message when you try to quote it in a relply.