Choosing studio monitors - Is it your most important buying decision?

So here we have the latest issue of sound on sound magazine it's dated september 2021. well it's only august at the moment but who's counting so what does it say on the cover choosing monitors choosing monitors and quite clearly it says your most important buying decision well what i'd like to consider here is whether it is indeed your most important buying decision and what can happen if you get it wrong firstly i'll say that this is an excellent article it's long and detailed it's written by chris cough who's someone i've spoken to on a number of occasions but i'm not sure whether we've ever actually met in person over the years in fact i'd say that the article contains just about everything that as a producer or engineer you'd need to know about monitor loudspeakers so i'd recommend that you get the mag and read the article you can buy the mac on the newsstands now or you can go to soundsound.com and get a digital subscription so choosing monitors what is it that you have to decide we can simplify this in a number of ways and firstly i'll make a big simplification and say big or small do you want big monitors or do you want small monitors or we could say main monitors or near field monitors what do i mean by main monitors i mean monitors that are large and are some distance away from you as the engineer here's the photo of a bbc radio studio and you can see their monitors there's some distance from the engineer they're also spaced away from the walls which is the way the bbc likes it so when you listen on main monitors you're hearing the sound from the monitors directly and you're hearing quite a lot of reverberation from the room you're listening pretty much as a real world listener would listen although on better quality equipment in better acoustics small monitors on the other hand you'll probably use as near fields what this means is that the monitors are so close to you that you hear mostly the direct sound and the reflected sound from the room is insignificant in comparison so this is a good way of working it's not the only way of working but it's a good way and small loudspeakers are commonly used as near field monitors which isn't to say they have to but they are so we can cut through this quickly and say that you're going to choose small monitors and use them in the near field the reason for this is that maybe you can't afford big monitors or more likely you don't have the space for big monitors so small it is and let's stick with that by the way if you want to learn how to make your buying decisions i'm not telling you what to buy but learn how to make these decisions then you might take a look at equipping your home recording studio which is a downloadable ebook that you can get from audio masterclass i'll put the link down in the description so your next decision is whether you should choose accurate monitors or flawed monitors that sounds like a peculiar thing why would you want bad monitors there's a good reason why and i will tell you in a moment so how can monitors be flawed there are two principal ways one is the frequency response and one is the time response there are other ways but frequency and time are the main two in my opinion so the frequency response should be flat with a good extension on the low frequency end if it goes like that it's not so good because you're not hearing all the bass that you need to hear to make good monitoring decisions but is a fundamental law of physics that to get good low frequency and good extension on the low frequency end you need big loudspeakers and there really is no substitute for that but we've already said that you're going to choose small loudspeakers so what can we do the answer to this is to make the small loudspeaker a base reflex design so there are two main alternatives one is the closed box which is completely sealed the other is the base reflex where the inside of the cabinet is connected to a tube to a hole to the outside world and this gives the base reflex loudspeaker a resonant frequency and if the designer positions that resonant frequency just where the roll-off would have otherwise started you can get a bit of extra extension on the bass and that's a good thing more bass and we all like that but there's a problem with that imagine a kick drum or a bass drum as we sometimes like to call it in the uk so the drummer hits the pedal and the kick drum goes out that's the way the head of the kick drum will move so that's the way your last speaker diaphragm should move as well kick out kick in dive from out diaphragm in that's the way it should be if you've got a good time response but the problem with the bass reflex loudspeaker is that it has a resonance and what this means is when the kick drum goes kick out kick in the diaphragm of the loudspeaker goes kick out bounce around a bit okay kick out bounce around a bit back in again okay that sounds sounds funny i can't stop myself laughing but you get the idea so instead of going like that it goes boom like that also if you get the idea so what's the problem you've got a boomy bass and worse still it centers around one frequency which is the resonant frequency so sometimes and i didn't make this up sometimes we call this a one note bass and that is characteristic of bass reflex speakers of course designers will try their best to ameliorate this some designs are worse and the one not bass effect will be worse some designs are better and the one note based effect is as good as it possibly can be within reasonable parameters so what i can say from this is that the closed box is going to be more accurate time wise than the base reflex loudspeaker and more accuracy should seem like a good thing well it is a good thing it's a very good thing because it will tell you exactly what's in your recording or in the olden days we would say what's on the tape it tells you exactly what's on the tape and as an engineer that's what you need to know you need to have as much information as possible about what your recording actually sounds like irrespective of the monitor loudspeaker so that's a good thing it's a really good thing because you can make all your recording and mixing decisions in full knowledge of what's on the tape at least as nearly as possible but the thing is that's not what your listeners hear because your listener has bass reflex loudspeakers nearly all commercially sold high file loudspeakers are base reflex designs simply because there's more bass and people like more bass and why shouldn't they and it has to be said that the average music lover doesn't really care whether there's a one-note bass or not in fact they might choose loudspeakers particularly because they like the notes that they produce and once again why not if that's what people like you can't argue against that so as an engineer and producer working in your own studio your home studio perhaps you also need to know what your listeners are hearing so you need to know what's on the tape and what your listeners hear so should you choose a closed box to hear accurately what's on the tape or should you choose base reflex loudspeakers so you hear what your listeners hear well it isn't an either or choice if you can afford it you should have both you should have the closed box and the base reflexed now for me i prefer the closed box and indeed i have the classic yamaha ns10m i love these loudspeakers i know a lot of people quibble with them for one reason or another but when i listen to my recordings or anybody's recordings through these loudspeakers i feel as though i'm hearing exactly what the recording sounds like exactly what's on the tape whereas if i listen through bass reflex monitors i'm hearing an interpretation of that so if i'm making a serious recording i'll do all my recording editing and mixing listening through my closed box loudspeakers because i know that they're more accurate but before i finalize the project i will check them on a pair of bass reflex monitors i've got a pair of krk rocket 5. so i'm not particularly recommending those they're just one of a number of good bass reflex loudspeakers and if need be i'll tweak my mix so it sounds as good as possible on both the closed box and on the bass reflex so going back to sound on sound this is apparently the most important decision you'll ever make but we can take this a stage further okay you've decided whether to choose closed box or base reflex or both great but which make and model do you choose of each this most important buying decision the thing is though that a decision may be between something that's obviously good and obviously bad in which case the decision is easy to make you choose a thing that's obviously good but you might be choosing between two things which are very very close and you can't really tell which is good and which is bad well the answer is almost there for you if you can't tell the difference it doesn't matter which you choose okay there could be some element of chance that could have swayed your decision one way or another if you had access to more information but in the big white world of recording it really isn't going to matter all that much because two things the first is that nearly every loudspeaker that's sold into the pro audio market is fully capable of professional results with very few exceptions so when you've bought your monitors with their closed box base reflex or if you're lucky enough both and you've decided on a make and model the next step is to learn how to use them yes you have to learn how to use your monitors the reason for this is that you don't really know what they sound like yes you can plug them in and play some music through them and you can hear what they sound like but you haven't learned what they sound like the way you do that is to get some music which is in your favorite genre or style music that you would like to emulate or work in the same genre or style and preferably you should choose successful commercial releases so if your music can sound like a successful commercial release surely it's got a good chance of being successful itself so you gather together some successful commercial releases on a spotify playlist or something like that and you play them through your new monitor loudspeakers in your studio so over time you get to learn what your monitor speakers sound like so there we have it now you know how to make your most important buying decision or as i said earlier you can download equipping your home recording studio the ebook from audio masterclass and that will cover the whole range of studio equipment it won't tell you what to buy but it'll tell you how to go about deciding i'm david miller course director of audio masterclass thank you for listening.