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
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You know, a lot of people recommend treating rooms when people ask about monitors, and of course the room is very important (I've certainly treated mine). But I'd much rather have really good monitors in a standard room than lousy monitors in a good room. They're way more important. So the first step is a good monitoring set-up in my opinion. Then you can look at the problems in your room, which usually come down to excess reverb and bass trapping - both of which you can fix inexpensively or free. I find it amusing how Ethan Winer of all people has become the acoustics version of Bob Katz ("go read his site and you'll come out an expert"). Ethan a nice fellow and he makes good broadband bass traps, but he's not a trained acoustician.
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By the way, the reason monitors are more important even though you can measure incredible frequency bumps of several dB in most rooms is that a measurement microphone is not a human ear. It doesn't take into account psychoacoustics. In other words, the brain compensates for a lot of terrible problems in room.
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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
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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 :)
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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.
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@Nick Batzdorf said:
This new forum software makes everything come out in a single paragraph! Why?
I would like to know that, too. 😕 ... I get the nice format toolbox only on PC with IE, not on PC with Opera, and not at all on a Mac.
CM explores this, and in the meantime I add my format tags manually ... sigh.
/Dietz
/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library -
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
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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? [;)]
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This is a known problem and was discussed several times in the "Website"-subforum. As long as there is no "real" solution, just type the command "br" between angled brackets instead of an ordinary CR.
You sould see it in this message when you try to quote it in a relply.
HTH,
/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library -
Thanks Dietz. I'm still learning my way around the forums here and didn't even notice the Website-subforms.@Dietz said:
You sould see it in this message when you try to quote it in a relply.
Thanks for the heads up.
Greg
