I’m no golden-eared audiophile, and to be honest I really don’t want to be. It seems to me to be one of those fields with very little real upside, like becoming a wine connoisseur. The net result of becoming a wine connoisseur seems to be that you become pretty much unable to enjoy a simple, inexpensive decent wine without a hundred complications cluttering up your thoughts, and I think becoming an audiophile means being forever dissatisfied with, say, speaker cones that aren’t hand-wired by hermetic Tibetan monks that had more prayer wheels and flags going than the the Tibetan monks had who hand-wired the speaker cones that your best friend bought last week.
It somehow escapes me why I would want to start down a path that leads to more, possibly limitless dissatisfaction at enormously higher cost.
The audio realm is also where I’ve seen more snake-oil pedaled than any other field I’ve explored in my life. There is just an incredible amount of BS and useless, horribly expensive gear out there. I may not have the best ear, but I know enough science, and physics in particular, to often, not always, but pretty often, be able to spot when I’m being blatantly lied to, whether the actual speaker knows that it’s a lie or not.
By and large, the realm of “professional audio” seems less prone to all this nonsense than most of the audio realm. Not only is that refreshing, but it makes a lot of sense. Professionals have to compete in a real marketplace, and they have to satisfy employers and audiences of various types, including those who purchase recordings, so there is some real-world feedback, some level of accountability in that part of the field. Sure, there’s still sales hype and nonsense, but eventually if what is being paid for proves not to be worth it on the bottom line, it’s going to tend to disappear.
I may be about to make an exception for “studio (reference) monitors”. I have, admittedly, pretty much zero experience with them, and I really tried to learn more about them with an open mind and no preconceptions. Having done so, I can’t say that they are or are not worth the money that professionals pay for them (which is often extreme), but I can say, for sure, that many of the reasons for that that I’m being fed make no sense.
Many of the explanations I’ve read and heard for the desirability of purchasing studio monitors amount to no more than a description of the differences between them and consumer stereo speakers, as though the differences in and of themselves explained why the studio monitors are better and necessary… but they really don’t explain that.
Most “consumer” stereo speakers larger than those used on a desk with a computer are passive, externally-driven speakers, that is, they require a separate amplifier to take line-level analog signals and add enough energy to them to drive the speakers. Studio monitors, on the other hand, either have amplifiers in each cabinet with the actual drivers, or are like many of the small sets of speakers intended for use on a desk with a computer in that one of them hooks to the line-level source and has an amplifier built into it, and that amplifier powers the actual drivers that it shares a cabinet with and the drivers in the other speaker cabinet.
Okay, there’s nothing obviously very wrong with that approach, but different does not necessarily mean better.
One real advantage of this design is that the amplifier can be tuned to the speakers, since it is part of one and is never expected to drive anything different. I’ll give them that. But note that whatever advantages there might be to having an amplifier right there in the cabinet with the drivers, those advantages don’t apply to the other speaker, it’s simply a passive, externally-driven speaker very much like the consumer stereo speakers that these are supposed to be superior to.
There’s another potential problem of having the amp in one cabinet- one of your two speakers probably weighs close to twice as much as the other, and has a lot less air space within it, what with a circuit board and caps and MOSFETS and big heat sinks and pots and whatall, not to mention a heat-generating engine. What are the chances that two speakers so different in weight, internal plenum volume and cabinet resonance really sound exactly the same? My inexpert mind guesses that the chances of that are not too good. Can it be compensated for to some degree? Certainly, like most things, if you add expense. Is it worth that expense and possibly failure to have the speakers sound alike, rather than having two identical speakers powered by an external amp?
That’s far, far less clear.
Nor is it clear that it’s desirable to have one set of drivers co-habitating with the amp in the same cabinet while the other set, driven by that same amp, are at the end of a long cable somewhere across the room. Surely there must be some difference in impedence between the two very different connection lengths? Could that also be audible? I honestly don’t know, but I also don’t know why not.
Okay, let’s move on to another often-repeated advantage: “balanced” input. I do “get” how this works, it’s a very clever analog hack, and clearly one that should be exploited, especially for long cables carrying tiny amounts of energy and subject to electromagnetic noise roughly near the order of magnitude of the signal itself, as in microphone cables. No problem.
I’ve got some hesitation with the way they are used in studio monitors, though- with a “balanced” signal (XLR or TRS or the capability for either) being piped into the one that has the amplifier, and that amplifier driving the other speaker with an unbalanced cable. Obviously, I’ve already conceded that a “balanced” connection is more desirable the less energetic the signal, so in that way this makes sense not to use it for the secondary connection, the signal going from the amp to the other speaker has a LOT more energy, so it’s less necessary. But… is this really a better solution than a (potentially much) shorter balanced cable running to an external amp or pre-amp, and higher-energy (less noise-prone) signals going to two identical speakers? Sorry, that’s not at all clear.
To be honest, in reading the specs for a number of these, many don’t actually say that the XLR or TRS jacks are really “balanced” at all (or even that they are TRS and not TS jacks). For all I can tell they may just ignore the third conductor entirely, and there is actually no circuitry to take advantage of such input. Maybe I’m all wrong about that suspicion, but much of the literature is not explicit on the point, even to the extent of showing TS plugs in the manual, and many, perhaps most mixers and audio interfaces seem to lack balanced outputs anyway. In short, it’s not even clear that this feature even exists except perhaps in the most expensive of equipment.
That leads to another completely unrelated point: As I said, all of these studio monitors seem to have the amplifier in one speaker. In many studios the monitors live on a wall some distance from the working position of the user/engineer/producer. This means the controls, including the power control, are out of reach. Not only that, but most often those controls are on the back of the speaker cabinet that contains the amplifier itself. I’m sorry, but that just sort of sucks, even if it is traditional. I understand that the operator can control the level of output by controlling the input signal, but that’s anything but optimum for reducing noise, and doesn’t address the power problem at all. Seriously, you’re supposed to get up, walk across to the speakers and reach behind one to turn the speakers on or off? How many times are you going to forget to turn them on before sitting down, or forget to turn them off when leaving the room? That’s gotta be seriously annoying.
So now, finally, we come to the really, really big, important point that is claimed for “studio monitors” over and over again: Studio monitors are designed to produce a really “flat” response across their frequency range (whatever that is), whereas consumer stereo speakers are just designed to “sound good” with, supposedly, no thought about flat response at all.
Really? I mean, that may be true of some of the stuff sold in large discount stores that’s designed to just to put out as much bass as possible so that every neighborhood driven through gets to enjoy the beat, but if you talk to any audiophile or half-decent manufacturer of stereo speakers they’re going to tell you that flat frequency response is very much one of their primary goals, and that they do as much to achieve it as possible at any given price point, especially since it’s one of the qualities easiest to measure. In fact it’s the most traditional and long sought-after goal of audiophiles everywhere. Not to say that it’s the only one, there are several other qualities, like detail, imaging and transient response that don’t show up on a simple frequency chart that are very important to realism, but, honestly, some of these guys spend truly breathtaking amounts of money on speakers. If studio monitors were really better, or even the best at any given price point, why would audiophiles everywhere not be abandoning their stereo rigs by the millions and flocking to studio monitors instead? It can’t be price.
Not only does that make no real sense, but there’s the simple logical problem that if studio monitors and stereo speakers really sound different then studio monitors are not reproducing what the end consumers of the mix will hear at all well. That would seem to be a major problem. The makers of studio monitors justify the extra expense by differentiating their product from the equipment that the ultimate consumers of the studios’ product use, but it is not at all clear that this is a good thing even in theory.
This gets even more ridiculous. I recently ran across this gem, and I love it. Things seldom reach this height of patently ridiculous:
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10. Avantone Mix Cubes
A common problem when working on high-end monitors is…
A mix that sounds spectacular in the studio…
May not always translate well when played on lo-fi consumer speakers.
To solve this problem, the Auratone company invented a small set of monitors in 1958, known as the Auratone 5C Super Sound Cube…
Which simulated the less-than-ideal performance conditions of typical consumer speakers.
For decades to come, the Auratones held strong as the industry standards in secondary reference monitors.
Once they were discontinued, many copycats arose…
And the Avantone Mix Cubes, eventually became the new standard which we all use today.
As a supplement to ANY of the other monitors on this list, I highly recommend you grab yourself a pair of Mix Cubes as well.*
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Are you getting all this? You have to have a primary set of studio monitors, you see, because they are vastly superior to consumer speakers, but that may mislead you, so you need a secondary set of studio monitors which are also vastly superior to consumer speakers but are cleverly designed to emulate, to sound as though they were the vastly inferior consumer speakers.
So, you do your mix with your excellent primary studio monitors, but then you have to check it with the secondary monitors which pretend to be inferior speakers so you’ll know how it’s going actually going to sound to the world outside that doesn’t have your wisdom to have invested all that money in speakers as excellent your primary set, and you adjust the mix again to sound good on expensive speakers brilliantly designed to sound like typical cheap speakers.
Heaven forbid that anyone suggest that it would be a whole helluva lot simpler and less expensive to just do the initial mix on speakers that actually are similar to those where the mix is destined to be played anyway. Nope, that wouldn’t do. We need not one but two sets of very expensive studio monitors, one set pretending to be cheap consumer speakers. Got it.
I love it. I’m feeling just so… elite and superior, understanding this rationale. Excuse me while I go barf in a corner.
Look, I’m admittedly no expert on any of this, and it’s certainly possible that I’m wrong about all of it because of arguments I haven’t come across or technical considerations I’m not aware of, but that’s the point. The explanations we’re being fed simply do not, in and of themselves, make sense. I can’t be certain whether it’s because no one is capable of explaining these things better, or no one wants to bother because they assume I am/we are incapable of understanding it, or if, just possibly, it’s because there’s a whole lot of BS floating around this subject, a metaphorical octopus ink-cloud of dubious explanations, rationalizations and jargon obfuscating lack of real value…
… but one of those is true, and it is a problem, because they want my money and I’m still pretty unconvinced. I’m guessing I’m not the only one.
– Robert the Wombat
* http://ehomerecordingstudio.com/best-studio-monitors/