Music Studio Monitors

 A thorny subject to be sure, with as many opinions as is believable. As with microphones and sequencers, the debate often turns into flame-fests. Yet there has been some progress in our understanding of monitors. Nearly everyone seems to agree that one needs a "near field" monitor to accurately assess the music they are creating. A near field monitor is one that you keep pretty close to you, typically between 3-5 feet. The idea here is that the music we  hear is dramatically altered by room acoustics.  Go try a little experiment. Take any speaker and put it in the corner of a room. You will hear bass resonating through the room that does not exist when the speaker is in the middle of the room. 
 

Those with big buck studios can afford to treat their room acoustically, with bass traps and other devices.  Perhaps those are the only places where one still sees the mammoth monitors that create wall sized sound. The near field monitor is the solution to minimize as much as possible the interaction of sound with the room.  Because they are positioned close to you, you hear the sound directly.  Because they are so close you need less volume, so less of the sound travels to walls and corners and bounces back at you. 
 

Unlike a hi-fi speaker, which is designed, hopefully, to make all audio material sound pleasing to the ear, the studio monitor has as it's main objective to paint an accurate audio image of the material, with no unnatural emphasis or de-emphasis of particular frequencies. This is what it means when a monitor is said to be "flat".  and "uncolored" or "transparent". That's the theory at least. Reality sometimes paints a different picture. And this is where the arguing typically begins. 

What makes a good Monitor?   

 So, then, what makes a good monitor, other than the sound it produces?  A good monitor is rugged, and can handle peaks, overloads, feedback mistakes and come back ready for more. It's funny. I started my sound development business on hi-end 3-way audiophile speakers, which worked great for a year. But with the constant tweaking of sound experiments in sub bass regions, the woofers just popped right out of their cones with a 360 degree rip around the cone. Bummer. Hi-Fi speakers are not made to take abuse above typical programmed material. Sure you can use them, just don't use them as the main monitors.  

A good monitor does not artificially exaggerate frequencies. You do not want a speaker that sounds like a "disco smile". That's where the bass and the treble are boosted and the mids are cut. They call it a "smile" because that's how it looks on a graphic equalizer. Lots of people really like that sound. If you like that sound, mix up a nice smile for your monitors. Then it might actually translate on other systems. But if you speakers make that automatically, you mix will be shown lacking in bass and high transients. Using that principle was the secret behind the Yamaha NS-10s, the most horrible sounding speaker ever made. On an NS10 there was no bass, no high end, just screeching awful sounding peaky mids. People who referenced on them had to boost the bass massively and cut the mids. The resultant mix?  Yep, the disco smile. It made hit after hit and people thought they were magic. If you could make the shrill box sound passable, it would sound great everywhere else.