Brief Summary

Is this an audio production myth? The sound comes out of the speakers so if the sound isn’t as good as you’d like, it’s natural to think that changing them will fix things. But Julian suggests that there is more to it than that…

Going Deeper

Do you need expensive monitors to mix well? Superficially that sounds like something that is self evident. Of course you need good monitors to hear what you are doing well enough to be able to make great decisions about your, presumably great, mix. But it's really important to point out that a statement like the title of this article oversimplifies things way too much.

To begin with expensive doesn't necessarily mean good. It should do, but there are some brands of professional monitor, which I can't help noticing seem to have an awful lot of detractors. Good is very subjective of course but price isn’t a good guide on its own. I’m not going to name the brand I'm thinking of because I've never used them myself, which is part of the reason why I'm so curious about why so many people whose opinions I respect haven't got more good things to say about them. You're welcome to speculate in the comments, but I'm not going to join in.

And cheap doesn’t necessarily equate with nasty. I’ve auditioned and tested a lot of monitors in the past and I have to say that, while the value you can get these days is incredible, there’s only so far you can go when designing to a tight budget and freed of those constraints monitors get better. Not a little, a lot better. And one of the first budget monitors I auditioned which really surprised me with how good they were considering how inexpensive they were, were the JBL 306P MkII. These active 2 ways might have been memorably described in the review as looking a little bit “Darth Vader” but you couldn’t argue with the bang for buck they delivered and it should come as no surprise that the team behind this design were involved in setting up Kali Audio, who redefined what a pair of useable monitors cost with their Project Lone Pine LP series.

I'm not going to pretend that either of these, very accessibly priced monitors can compete with, for example, the pair of PMC 6-2s I had in the studio a couple of months ago. You can really hear where the 30x difference in price goes and anyone who tries to tell you different just hasn’t heard any nice enough speakers. But that isn’t to say that if you spend lots of money you’re sorted. Unfortunately life isn’t that simple. Good speakers are necessary but not sufficient on their own. Expensive monitors help but are only part of the solution.

Room Acoustics (Again…)

You’ve never actually heard your monitors, you’ve just heard the combination of your monitors in your room. Enter that trickiest of issues to solve - Room acoustics. Our brains are so effective at tuning out the sound of the room that we’re in that it always surprises me that our perception of our monitoring systems is as acceptable as it is once you see the awful truth revealed by the analysis plot in your calibration software. While I hope that technology will start to help us more than it currently does, at the moment there are few alternatives to the old fashioned solutions of passive acoustic treatment, by which I mean bass traps, absorber panels and possibly some diffusion. The harm your room does to your monitors is indiscriminate and your room doesn't care whether it's ruining the sound of a £200 pair of bookshelf speakers or five figures worth of professional monitoring.

Acoustic treatment is always worth doing. It's incredibly unlikely that an untreated room won't be improved by even a little acoustic treatment, but it's important to make sure that the treatment you are installing is in proportion and appropriate in terms of the room and what it needs. For example filling a room with inadequate, thin foam absorption is just going to absorb some high frequency information, which probably isn't where your issue is, and will just make the room sound dull. Probably exaggerating the nasties lower down the frequency spectrum which thin foam is never going to affect.

The more one learns about room acoustics and acoustic treatment, the more depressing the truth becomes. Basically you'll never going to have that perfect room that you’d like, and the law of diminishing returns kicks in hard when dealing with room acoustics. The principal issues in most project studios are in the bottom end, and are stubbornly difficult, impractical and expensive to adequately address. This results in some people throwing up their hands in despair and not treating their spaces at all.

Calibration

This is where what is commonly referred to as room correction, but should correctly be described as speaker calibration, solutions really come to their own. Anything from the software-only SonarWorks to the mighty Trinnov, speaker calibration products measure the combined effects of your speakers and your room from the listening position, compare it to the speaker’s input and use EQ and phase manipulation to achieve as close to a flat response as possible. This sounds ideal. Of course anyone who has a good working knowledge of these solutions understands that they can fix peaks, but can do a little about the troughs in response caused by destructive interference and room nulls. And issues in the time domain such as room resonances causing inconsistencies in the room’s reverb can't be addressed properly using just gain. Check out our discussion with Marcel Schecter of Genelec for more on these limitations. However, I'm yet to meet somebody who has dropped several thousand pounds on a Trinnov who regrets it, so I think that probably speaks for itself.

But is that it? Buy some expensive monitors, spend even more money on the correct acoustic treatment to fix the room that is so unhelpfully spoiling your expensive monitors, and then get some speaker calibration to further improve the results? Well actually, yes it is. Do all of those things and you're in with a good chance of making your room sound as good as it can, but is there anything else, anything which people for whom ‘doing it properly’ isn’t going to happen just yet?

The Monitors And The Room Are One System

Precisely where the monitor is and how it is mounted are also important. Speaker stands serve two purposes - They support a speaker at the right point in space so that it can contribute correctly towards the soundfield, but they also are the thing against which force is exerted by the moving drivers. There are a plethora of products which seek to isolate speakers from whatever they are placed upon by decoupling them from the room. But really solid speaker stands still make a difference. The amount of good monitors I’ve seen on cheap adjustable stands is surprising. Apart from the acoustic benefits, do you want the only thing stopping your expensive monitors from falling from height to be a wobbly £50 stand?

Something to think about if you’re trying to get the best from less than ideal monitoring is how loud you are listening. Less expensive monitors probably have a lower max SPL and have less headroom available. Running monitors harder than suits them is going to make them a little ragged but it doesn't stop there. Your ears respond differently at different monitoring levels and if you’re being too enthusiastic with your monitoring level, you are also shifting the frequency response of your ears. These changes in response to level were identified by Fletcher and Munson and their results are well known as Fletcher-Munson curves. Sometimes the motivation for monitoring loudly is to gain some impact at the bottom end, and while it's true that loud monitoring gives a different feel to bass content, I would also rather controversially suggest that while deep bass is impressive, it's not as important during mixing as some might be tempted to think.

Bass Extension - Not As Important As You Might Think

I'm not saying that bass isn't important, everything is important. But midrange is more important and I’d rather spend my money on some top quality, smaller monitors than some bigger monitors with impressive bass extension but poorer response through the all-important midrange. It's very difficult to monitor deep bass accurately over loudspeakers in a project studio. Just choosing the monitors which roll off at the lowest frequency according to the paper specs isn't going to help as much as might be thought because of the aforementioned interaction between the room you're listening in and the speakers you're listening to.

With a typical room, dimensions of home and project studios, the most important areas of the bass are frequently plagued by deep nulls as a result of room modes and the only way to address these is through adequate bass trapping, which is expensive and occupies a great deal of space. Something which is usually in short supply in a typical project studio. To adequately trap deep bass requires very thick broadband traps or extremely carefully designed tuned traps. Both are expensive to do properly. An interesting development is that of active bass traps like those manufactured by PSI Audio. These aren't cheap either, but they are compact, not room-specific and very transportable if you were to change studios.

What About Headphones?

No discussion of room acoustics would be complete without mentioning headphones and while for many people, they are very much the poor relation to loudspeakers, they are an effective way to bypass the contribution of the room altogether and, as an alternative reference, that is very difficult to argue with. Few people are happy mixing exclusively on headphones, but most people value the alternative perspective provided by a decent pair of headphones and the benefit-to-cost analysis of a pair of headphones is impossible to argue with. If you want to know what's going on at the bottom end of your mix in your small studio control room a quick check on a pair of headphones can reveal things which might otherwise be obscured by your room’s acoustics.

Increasingly, we see clever processing offering virtualisation of mix spaces to try to offer a more monitor-like experience whilst mixing on headphones. For example Russ was very impressed by Slate’s VSX system. However much many of us would prefer not to mix on headphones, there are some quite compelling arguments that mixing on headphones is more relevant than ever with so much music consumption happening on mobile devices via headphones or earbuds, and with spatial and Dolby Atmos mixes being consumed in the majority of cases as binaural mixes via headphones. We are probably going to find ourselves using headphones as a more and more significant reference rather than just a convenient way to escape the sound of our rooms.

The development of increasingly sophisticated binaural processing including personalised head related transfer functions such as Genelec’s Aural ID and APL Virtuoso mean that while the advice is always not to mix Atmos exclusively on headphones, given the existence of such products and the expense and complexity of setting up Atmos monitoring systems, people are going to do it anyway!

So Do You Need Expensive Monitors To Mix Well?

Returning to our original question - Do you need expensive monitors to mix well? The answer remains that it really helps but you can still produce good mixes without owning an expensive pair of monitors. You've probably heard people say that in spite of the issues that their mix room has they “know the room”. Being accustomed to the sound of a room is important, regardless of how well-treated or not it might be. But if somebody proposes that, because they know the sound of their room, it doesn't matter how it sounds, I'm not sure that's a point of view that stands up to scrutiny. However well you know your room unless you’ve done everything you can, given your specific situation, to treat it the money you spend on upgrading your monitors might be better spent on treatment.

It's a piece of advice that we've offered over and over again on the site, but I'll still repeat it here that it's difficult and expensive to create a really top class monitoring environment. In most areas in life if we can't afford to buy then we rent and it makes sense, economically at least to hire in the things that you can't afford to buy. The monitoring equivalent of this is a mastering engineer. We’d all like a world-class monitoring environment in our studios. Nearly all of us can't afford one. But we can benefit from the results having our mixes pass through one by carefully choosing and using a good mastering engineer.