Once good quality loudspeaker studio monitoring is in place, the only thing left to do is optimise it for your space. Read on for five ways on to get the most out for free…

Most will be familiar with the modern mantra along the lines of “your gear’s probably fine. Use it the right way and everything else will also probably be fine”. There is plenty of information out there about mic use, mixing techniques, and audio plugins, on the understanding that the standard of gear out there is (on the whole) up to scratch. All that is left then is the missing link of the engineer to do their job properly. Perhaps strangely, the same conversations around monitor speakers are fewer and further between. As with much permanently installed gear, this could have something to do with their set-and-forget nature. After initial setup, it’s quite easy for such equipment to end up in stasis following a brief consultation with the manual!

As with so many things, sometimes the biggest problems have the simplest solutions (although acousticians may agree to differ on that…). Maybe your monitoring works brilliantly for you right now. If that’s the case, you might choose not to read on. If, however, what you’re hearing seems to fall short of what you think should be hitting your ears this guide could help. Although the main focus is aimed towards those working in stereo, the same principles broadly apply to those mixing in multichannel environments as well.

1 - Room Layout

When it comes to the room, bigger is better. For some, changing the very dimensions of a room is not off the table. However, for the other 99.9% of facilities, the one thing that is not going to change is the dimensions of the room in which loudspeakers are placed. Large studios often see the console and monitoring set up along the longest wall. Aside from being able to squeeze the console in, this keeps the side boundaries away from the speakers which can improve stereo imaging (by distancing mirror points at MF and HF). Its often said that in a smaller rectangular room, monitor speakers should instead be firing down its longest dimension (set up along the shortest wall).

The thinking here is to help minimise the possibility of the engineer sitting in the midway point in the room where low frequency cancellation is at its worst. While this might be true in many cases, following this ‘rule’ slavishly might cause more problems than it solves. If doing so results in monitors being stuffed up against a wall (or even worse, into a corner), consider setting up against the longest wall and seeing how the system performs. Running a series of pure tones beginning from 20Hz and rising in semitones is still the ultimate test to actually hear what the low end is doing. Sit in the listening position and weep (or rejoice!).

2 - The Room Is Part Of The System

With all of the accuracy and consistency afforded by modern loudspeaker monitoring, it’s easy to forget that it is only part of the story, and that it might not even play the biggest part in what the engineer hears. To get the best out of loudspeakers, both they and the room must be considered as part of the same system. Any mic correctly placed is better than the ‘best’ mic badly placed, and when it comes to the other end of things, loudspeaker monitoring is no different. Assuming that engineers must make one available space work for them, things become much clearer as soon as both it and the gear are considered as one electroacoustic entity.

It’s hard to buy studio monitors that are not at least reasonably faithful to the input, so the engineer must accept that it is entirely possible to make their shiny new expensive monitors to sound bad by expecting them to sound their best irrespective of where and how they are placed. Get the manufacturer’s insight into how their product interacts with the room by reading the manual. Follow their guidelines on finer placement; all speakers are different despite looks. Some names have developed excellent tools to help the engineer ascertain what the space does to sound.

3 - Subwoofers Might Not Be For You

There is only one thing more damaging to monitoring quality than not being able to hear the low end without a sub, and that is hearing inaccurate low end with one. If you have a small room, getting a sub to provide a positive contribution to what you’re hearing can be hard to achieve, and some would argue that it’s actually better in this situation to use a single pair of smaller boxes without a sub. After all, if you’re checking everything on headphones, at least their LF response will tell you more about the mix than an absent sub or one in the wrong place. This keeps the problem out of the space, with small speakers lending themselves to close working, further reducing the contribution of a bad room.

4 - Subwoofers Might Be Just What You Need

If you do own a sub or two, the aim is lower bass extension, not louder bass extension. Keeping it nearer to the satellite speakers will avoid phase-related issues from the same frequencies arriving at different times to the listener. Placements near a wall will return a ‘free’ extra 6dB of acoustical output but may skew the spectral performance of the whole system without adjusting sub levels. Corner placements are best avoided (because floor + wall + wall = 18dB!). All things being equal, try placing the sub up high in the listening position and listening at prospective placements for the most even LF response. The most even-sounding place is where the sub(s) can land.

5 - On Reflections

Most engineers are aware of angle of incidence = angle of reflection. This explains common placements for side wall acoustic treatment and confirms that sound at mid frequencies (MF) and high frequencies (HF) can be understood using the familiar light analogy. While an understanding of this behaviour at MF and HF can help acousticians or engineers improve a monitoring system’s stereo imaging accuracy, another factor sometimes overlooked is that of surfaces in front of the engineer.

Any flat surface will cause a reflection back up to the engineer’s ears, and visualising a mirror (or using a real one) can reveal reflections’ paths if you can ‘see’ your speakers’ drivers in it. As frequency drops, this factor becomes less of a consideration as sound becomes more omnidirectional, with the converse true at HF. Although this is a fact of life, these reflections can interfere with the direct sound, with comb filtering being the result.

This phasing effect is very easy to hear during playback by slowly standing up and then back down again. As far as MF and HF are concerned, tilting speakers up or down, or ‘toe-ing’ them in or out can slightly can help with this and is especially effective when dealing with HF ‘beaming’. The same technique can be used to adjust monitor brightness vs width. It’s worth noting that monitors mounted on a meter-bridge will reflect off the console’s top panel, whereas those mounted behind will also reflect off bridges with flat surfaces. Adjusting up/down angle only needs to steer any reflections as low as the listener’s chest. Consoles with steeply raked surfaces help with this.

Tweak First, Buy Later

Some will be familiar with the following scenario: speakers underperforming, buy new speakers, put speakers in room, underwhelming performance remains. The physics of why this is is far beyond the scope of this article, however, speaking to those who design speakers or treat rooms always comes back to one inescapable truth: if studio monitoring is in the wrong room and/or in the wrong place it will underperform. With the converse being true, armed with these pointers, good results can be achieved with existing monitoring. Once that’s sorted, the fun can begin choosing some shiny new ones to take things to the next level…