Are studiomonitors bull?

[holger honda]

Heres my current ideas and some history of them.
I have been trying to make really loud studio monitors.
In reality what I have built is just some pretty refined PA speakers but annyhow it have led me to the following reasoning:
Even the flattest speakers are dependent on the room acoustics.
Therefore even the best ones have to be put in a very special room in order to sound the way they are designed.
I would almoust state that without a equalisation cirquit optimising the speaker to the room its in you would never really get a "flat" response from a speaker.
My guess is that there are eq cirquits built into many of the powered or active high end studiomonitors out there just to roughly adjust the drivers to play somewhat flat in the lab of the speakermanufacturer.
So why not just settle with somewhat flat speakers,equalise and measure the results in the room they are in and call it a day?
What you would end up with is a room specific flat responce and that is what you want from a studio monitor. Instead of paying a zillion bucks for a great set of speakers (or components) why not get pretty close and just eq it all out?
Sure i know EQ is a whole can of worms in itself......

[badman]

EQ often raises more concerns than it solves. Done right EQ is great. But it's rarely done right. Microphones have different criteria than human ears. We automatically disregard some input that microphones can't. Direct sound can be lower in level than reflections/standing waves yet still humans respond dominantly to the direct sound.... EQ must be used carefully not to totally mess up the Frequency response in your head.

[Geek]

... room acoustics ...

The most important, most neglected and least understood part of any system.

I rented various monitors and EQ's when I recorded, trying to get it right.

Then i found the perfect solution - headphones

[pinkmouse]

Any errors in the time domain cannot really be corrected in the frequency domain. Controlled dispersion and room treatment are the key.

[AudioFreak]

Not to mention that EQ is far from a cure all......

To rehash what pinkmouse has just said....

Not all FR problems are really FR problems as such but rather time domain problems, room resonances etc etc.... These are things that EQ cannot really correct for properly.

You have to correct these things in the speakers themselves and in the room.

[sreten]

Hi,

the purpose of studio monitors is not really final EQ.

Their purpose is to allow monitoring at high level with low distortion.

The levels are needed to bring out the detail in the music track and
make subtle changes more obvious in the mix. Whether monitoring
at high levels is really needed is a moot point, it must be available.

/sreten.

[noah katz]

One thing that some studio monitors do that has a lot of merit in reducing room influences is constant directivity in the midrange and treble from the use of horns/waveguides.

[myhrrhleine]

Actually, non-equalised speakers often sound better than equalised ones.
You can equalise frequency response for smoothness, but you cannot equalise other speaker shortcomings.
This is especially true of trying to equalise room reflections, absorbtions, or other shortcomings
The better studios have the room acoustically treated to equalise the system response.

LEDE is usually best acoustically.

[anatech]

Most monitors are simply standards that all the engineers are familiar with. Awfultones and Yamaha NS-10 (with paper) or NS-10M. JBL was pretty much the standard large monitor in North America. They were anything but flat. They were loud.

-Chris

[rabbitz]

It was always said, that if you could mix to sound good on a Yamaha NS10M, then it would sound good on almost anything.

The day the pulp material ran out for them, there was panic in the studios around the world as so many were used to mixing with them to get consistant results..... maybe the poor recordings of recent times is due to their absence.