Monitor choice is very personal, There’s no single ‘right’ monitor, there are many good choices. But there are still some misconceptions. Here are five myths about studio monitoring.

Myth 1: Studio Monitors Should Sound Good

Have you ever heard a pair of NS10s? How about a pair of Auratones? These are extreme examples, but a monitoring system is different from a system designed exclusively for listening pleasure. Marketing materials will often refer to their speakers as “uncompromising", “revealing” and “truthful”, and with good reason. The job of a domestic listening system is to give the listener a pleasurable experience. The job of a studio monitor it to present the material in as accurate a way as possible to reveal sonic flaws and, most importantly, so as to maximise the chances of good mix translation when the recording makes it out of the studio and onto other people’s playback systems.

It’s not an uncommon criticism of monitors that they sound too ‘nice’. This often means they are voiced to accentuate the top and bottom end of the spectrum with a corresponding midrange scoop. While this can sound flattering and ‘expensive’, if used for referencing a mix it can encourage a mix which is heavy through the midrange and at risk of sounding harsh when played back on other systems.

Some monitors offer voicing controls, and some speaker calibration systems offer the facility to calibrate to a target curve other than flat. The former are principally intended for corrective use, though its tempting to set them so they sound ‘nice’. The latter have a valid use in professional settings, particularly as target curves do exist for Atmos for Music but the speaker calibration facilities found in DSP in speakers can be used for listening for pleasure or to mimic the response of other models of speaker.

I’ve had the experience of listening to a six figure monitoring system and being struck by how they didn’t sound as ‘nice’ as I might have expected when playing back my mixes. I took this as a sign of the quality of the monitoring and a sobering lesson in just how far away my studio’s monitoring is from the perfectly flat response we might think we’re buying when we choose our monitors.

Myth 2: More Expensive Means Better

This is a tricky one, so stay with me. There is definitely a correlation between how much you spend and what you get when it comes to monitors. Speakers are electromechanical and involve a lot of physical ‘stuff’ which, while it can be helped enormously by clever digital tricks, ultimately has to be done using relatively expensive components. The quality of a cabinet directly affects the results, the drivers have to be manufactured to tight tolerances and built to be rigid and powerful. These things cost money.

Speaker design used to involve trial and error, and multiple stages of prototyping but computer modelling has made this process faster and cheaper. Manufacturing in bulk in lower cost countries drives down prices and DSP and modern amplifier designs have made it possible to replace many expensive components with cheaper alternatives but there are still some things which are still done best the expensive way. It’s not unusual to hear people explain how their inexpensive monitoring for some reason circumvents this rule of ‘you get what you pay for’ but just look at what pro studios and mastering engineers use.

So how is it a myth that ‘More Expensive Means Better’? What I’m saying is that, while expensive, reputable monitors will outperform cheap alternatives, that’s not enough. You can’t get accurate monitoring just by choosing some expensive monitors. The room and the monitors work as one system and an acoustically poor room will compromise the performance of a pair of expensive monitors in exactly the same way as it will a pair of cheap nearfields. It takes more than just buying some nice monitors to get good monitoring.

Myth 3: The Room affects All Studio Monitors The Same

This picks up the closing point of the previous myth. While it’s true that room modes and reflection issues in any given listening space will be the same, this doesn’t take into account the fact that not all monitors disperse sound in the same way. If all loudspeakers behaved like a perfect point source then, assuming the speakers were placed in the same locations, the influence of the room would be identical from speaker to speaker. But studio monitors don’t behave like point sources and while many share very similar dispersion, hence the proposition at the end of the previous myth, some differ from this typical dispersion by a lot.

For conventional designs the directivity of a speaker increases with frequency. The lower the frequency the more like an omnidirectional point source the speaker behaves. Frequencies become more directional the closer the wavelength gets to the circumference of the speaker. As a result the flattest response is found directly on-axis with the speaker and various directional anomalies are exhibited when off-axis. Even when the listener is precisely on-axis to the monitors this can result in the sound being compromised at the listening position as the sound reflected back off the walls and ceiling, as well as being delayed relative to the direct sound, also differs in timbre.

There are two conventional approaches to this issue. The first is trying to ensure that the off-axis sound is as close as possible in timbre to the direct sound, meaning that the dispersion is wide and consistent, resulting in a wide sweet spot and reflected sound being as similar as possible to the on-axis sound. The second is trying to control the directivity using waveguides to keep the sound away from the walls and ceiling to minimise the reflected sound. The issue with this approach has always been that it is simple to control the directivity of high frequencies and impractically difficult to control the bass frequencies.

There are a few monitors on the market which can control the directivity of the whole audio spectrum. Kii and Dutch and Dutch are both notable in this area, but given the differences between many monitors at the top end there are some differences between how different monitors perform in the same room, but given that the most significant room issues are to be found at the bass frequencies it is only in the case of these rather specialised monitors which can control the directivity at the lowest frequencies that really significant differences between the performance of different monitors in the same room are likely to be found.

Myth 4: Bigger is Always Better

Ideally monitoring should be full range, and everyone loves deep bass, so it’s understandable that one of the first things we look at when checking out the specs of a pair of monitors is how low they go. I’ve seen seasoned live engineers reduced to giggling children by a huge sub-bass ‘wooommm’! Unfortunately there’s much more to good bass than buying some massive monitors which go down to 20Hz.

Unless its large and well treated, your room will conspire against you when it comes to bass. Luckily room modes are predictable and you can figure out where your problems are going to be in advance but dealing with it effectively can be very difficult. Looking at the relative importance of different areas of the frequency spectrum, while everything is important, the midrange is most important and if your monitors are accurate through the midrange and upwards, potential issues in the deep bass might be better outsourced to a mastering engineer.

A room mode will cause standing waves at specific frequencies, in typical domestic sized rooms these are frequently at important areas of the bass and given the typical size of home and project studios the listening position is often halfway along an axis of the room - a worst case scenario. If you are tempted to buy the biggest pair of monitors in your price range, just keep in mind that unless you are prepared to do the work necessary to optimise your environment your money might be better spent on a smaller pair of better quality monitors which have better performance at the expense of some bottom end extension.

Myth 5: You Don't Need Subwoofers with Good Studio Monitors

Continuing on from that last point. If you were to find you miss some bass extension a subwoofer is often a good solution. If you are working, or plan to work, in surround or Atmos you will need a subwoofer for your LFE but even if you are working in stereo only, a distinct advantage of a subwoofer is that you can place it in the most favourable place in your room to best accommodate it and without causing too many room-mode issues. While an ideal position might not be practical for other reasons. If you have a full range monitor its placement is dictated by its contribution to the sound field. If a speaker is the left hand speaker in a stereo pair, it has to be placed 30 degrees off axis at ear height to fulfil its role in creating the stereo panorama. If that position is inappropriate with respect to one of the room modes there’s not much you can do. Unless of course you detach the bass element of the full range monitor, which isn’t very sensitive to directional cues, from the highly directional midrange and HF producing elements and place it in a better location for it to generate bass in that particular space. In other words use a subwoofer.

Subwoofers which are manually set up (and often run too loud) have given subwoofers a bad name with some, but modern professional subwoofers are designed to complement specific monitors and many can be calibrated using speaker calibration software. The results of these systems is very impressive. Maybe you need a Sub?

What About You?

What about you? Are there any assumptions about studio monitoring you come across which you think don’t stand up to scrutiny? Share your thoughts in the comments.