It’s an unavoidable truth that monitoring through loudspeakers gets complicated. With a pair of headphones, you put them on and you get optimal performance - simple! With monitors, things are more involved and this is bad news for anyone looking for quick answers.

You can’t just buy a pair of quality monitors and get what you paid for. Monitors interact with the room in which they are placed and the sound that hits your ears is indivisibly combined with the influence of the room. Ask almost any working mix engineer what the number one purchase that would improve your mix room is and you’ll probably get the same answer - Acoustic treatment. However, there is something else that can help get the sound of your monitors to your ears - the placement of your monitors.

In his test of the Yoyo Sit-Stand Desk, Julian substituted his usual monitors for his old Genelecs because he prioritised monitors, which were in the correct place - in this case, mounted to the desk so they stayed in the optimum position both in the sitting and standing positions, over a better pair of monitors, which were in the wrong position at least half the time. It has to be said that a different arrangement of desk-mounted stands means he now has the better monitors in the right place but the principle still holds.

Monitor Specs Only Tell Half The Story

Frequency response graphs feature heavily in studio monitor marketing but they don't tell the whole story. Monitors are designed to produce a flat frequency response, typically from 20Hz to 20kHz (the range of human hearing) in an ideal room. In the real world, studio monitors struggle to achieve anything like that because of a couple of factors: 

1. The properties/dimensions of the room the monitors are in.

2. The positioning of the monitors.

Getting the best response from studio monitors requires a room specifically designed and built to have optimal acoustics… but that is expensive and difficult to achieve without skilled design. the reality is that hat those approaches aren’t practical for a lot of recording artists working in small home studios. So what can people working in home studios do in order to get better sounding monitors?

Reset Your Expectations

If your gear is in a typical domestic space you’re unlikely to get a truly flat frequency response from your monitors using positioning techniques and limited acoustic treatment as issues created by standing waves and room modes are more challenging to correct in smaller rooms. Without the space and budget for very bulky bass trapping, the bottom-end response is likely to be less than ideal but there is a lot that can be done to improve matters even if you can’t afford an acoustician and a truckful of Rockwool and timber. The goal here is to get the most from studio monitors using common sense along with a handful of tools. 

There are also some very clever software solutions available that have been around for a few years that adapt and improve the characteristics of studio monitors by use of EQ and other tech and we’ll cover those later in the article. The thing to note is that it is still very important to as good as possible before reaching for software aids such as speaker calibration.

Prepare To Invest Time - Possibly Extra Money

Positioning studio monitors often takes trial and error. You need your ears, judgement and in some situations, you may need to rethink your studio layout, in others you may even need to spend a little extra cash to buy some components to aid your monitoring setup. Let’s start with an essential step, then we’ll move to studio ergonomics and layout.

Where Do You Intend To Sit And Mix?

Home studio producers use spare rooms in their homes, garages, lofts or outhouses where space is often very limited. Small rooms present there own special acoustic challenges, but there are some tweaks that you can make, which should improve the response of your monitors.

First, you need to take the shape of your room into account. If your room is a rectangle, say 3m by 5m, then you have some options. The received wisdom is that it is best to fire down the longest axis of the room.

Make sure your studio gear is set up at the narrowest end firing down the length of the room. If you have a square room then you will face additional issues because two of the axial modes of the room (length and width) will be identical meaning that standing waves will be worse at the frequency which corresponds to that dimension. Firing your monitors down the longest length of the room in most rooms is the better choice but other factors can influence these choices.

Symmetry is important. Try to make sure everything is the same on both sides.

Start by positioning your computer display up when setting up monitors in a new studio space. This gives me a feel for where you are going to be sitting in the room mixing. Try and make sure this working position is in the centre between the side walls (left to right) and place your monitor speakers symmetrically. By doing this you will hear even reflections from my monitors from the sidewalls, which should give a more accurate stereo image. 

Try and make sure the back of the speakers is at least 30cm away from the front wall to avoid any reflections from the monitors, more is better if it can be achieved. This is really important, especially if you have monitors with rear ports. So many monitors are rear ported and if they are placed close to the wall the airflow can be obstructed.

The second consideration, when it comes to placing monitors against a wall, is the effect the sound reflected off the rear wall will have when it combines with the direct sound from the monitor. Because of time of arrival differences due to the longer distance the reflected sound has taken, the reflected sound will destructively and constructively recombine with the direct sound at frequencies dictated by the distance the monitor is away from the wall. This is one of the reasons why big studios have main monitors mounted in the walls in ‘soffits’. That way there is no distance between the back of the monitor and the rear wall.

Read The Manual

Read the manual, which came with your monitors as there may be switches available, which you can adjust to compensate for different placements.

Whilst you have the manual open, establish the recommended ‘toe-in’ angle for your monitors. If we assume, because most monitors are positioned this way, that your monitors need to be facing inwards in a triangle shape. The distance between the centre of your monitors should be equal from both monitor centres to your listening position, an equalaterial triangle. If the distance between your monitors is 1.2m then the listening position needs to be 1.2m from both left and right monitors. If your monitors are 2m apart and you are less than 2m from either monitor you need to find a way of bringing the monitors together.

It is also important to have both monitors at the same distance from the wall while having both monitors on the same line within the room. If the left monitor is closer to the wall, the sound from the right monitor will reach you first, affecting the experience of the stereo field.

What Are Your Monitors Positioned On?

There is a wide range of monitor stands available, though as the height requirement increases things get more difficult. Height adjustable stands with bases that stand freely on the floor are very popular but can be too flimsy to use with larger monitors. if this is the case there are other types to consider such as short desktop mount stands and smaller decoupling devices that sandwich between monitors and desks/workstation setups, such as DMSD speaker decouplers:

• Studio Monitor Stands - Beginners Buyers Guide

One drawback to using monitor stands is that you will most likely need to sacrifice space behind your studio gear or desk to position them while also allowing for suitable space between the rear of your monitors and the wall. We believe that it is worth sacrificing that space but it is worth reiterating that you will need to make sure your stands are strong enough to take the weight of your monitors whilst also being heavy and rigid.

Does Your Studio Have Acoustic Treatment?

Studio room acoustic treatment plays a huge role in getting monitors to sound more focused in small home studios but it’s important to be realistic about what can be achieved with off the shelf solutions.

There are two kinds of treatment available - absorption and diffusion. Which do you need? As a rule of thumb in a typical room, you will benefit from absorption, you might benefit from diffusion. How much absorption depends on which frequencies you need to control. Put simply the lower the frequency, the thicker the absorption needs to be. To absorb bass frequencies we’re talking feet rather than inches!

Off the shelf acoustic treatment rarely is able to do much to correct this, monitor positioning will do more to help. Also consider using software like the Sonarworks Reference measurement application to find out what the problems are and then consider how best to resolve them. It may be that repositioning things, can give a significant improvement.

• Combating Standing Waves With A Studio Subwoofer & Sonarworks Reference 4 Speaker Calibration

If off the shelf acoustic treatment alone doesn’t help to combat standing waves what is it good for? Acoustic treatment, used in the correct places can help your monitors sound more focused. If the correct depths of absorption materials and diffusion products are used in the main reflection points then things such as flutter echoes in a room can be reduced making your studio sound tighter.

• Acoustic Treatment - What Are We All Doing?

Broadband absorption panels work best. Such panels are wood frames with a thick layer of Rockwool, covered with a breathable fabric. They are very inexpensive to build with some basic DIY skills.

They perform best when positioned behind monitors, both sides of your listening position, at the first reflection points where your monitors are pointing and at the rear of the room. Corners are also important to address but we suggest that you fix the first reflection points to start with.

First Listening Test

At this point, you are now ready for some listening tests. First set the volume of your monitors to a low to medium level. You are aiming for a level not too quiet that you struggle to hear anything but also not so loud that you can't have a conversation.

First up, you want to use an ascending sine wave test that plays back each frequency at the same volume. Sit in your listening position, play the test below and focus on the frequencies that jump out at you or dip considerably. Try not to worry about anything below 50 Hz. What you are listening for are standing waves. Do this test a few times to really work out which frequencies have issues, write these down on paper and label it Test One. Don't worry if there are one or two frequencies jumping out at you, remember we cannot achieve a perfectly flat frequency response in a small domestic room. We've got two options we can try to help balance out some of those standing waves:

1. Reposition your monitors into the room and repeat tests

2. Get a measuring tape and try this very useful online speaker placement calculator at No AudioPhile. It's a very simple calculator that you can enter your studio dimensions into. It provides monitor placement measurements recommendations.

With some trial & error and a few rounds of tests, you should be getting closer to smoothing out the ascending sine wave.

Alternatively, you could just the free Room EQ Wizard software, which with a low-cost USB measurement mic will show you where these peaks and troughs are.

Real-World Test

After testing and repositioning you should be getting a good idea of what your monitors can achieve in your room. Hopefully, you've found the best position for your monitors. Sure, there will be compromises but the tests should now at least give you a good idea of which frequencies are problematic in your space and cannot be resolved by positioning alone.

It's time to put your monitors to work, produce a mix and test it out in the real world. If what you have mixed sounds the same in a consumer playback system as it did in your studio then your job is completed. If not then you may need to go back and make some minor adjustments to your setup again.

Software Solutions

In the decade or so speaker calibration software has grown to be very popular in studios. Luckily for us, it doesn't cost the earth nor does it take a degree in science to set up. Trinnov, Sonarworks and IK Multimedia all offer their own Speaker Calibration software that all do a great job of providing users with a flatter frequency response in studio monitoring.

However these products do cannot wave the metaphorical magic wand, they can make a good room better, but they cannot work miricales. They do not work very well unless you've not got acoustic treatment in your studio, nor do they work if you've not taken the time to properly position your monitors. Speaker Calibration products work best when monitor positioning has been done to its best and when acoustic treatment is well thought out and implemented, think of Speaker Calibration as the final component to a monitoring setup, not the first step.

The Caveat

It takes a fair amount of time to learn properly learn characterises of your monitoring system. Even if, in a perfect world, you had a perfectly flat frequency response from your studio monitors in a purpose-built recording studio that doesn’t have any acoustic problems you would still need to put the time into learning how your monitors sound.

If you want a detailed walk through of how to correctly set up speaker calibration for your monitors, read Mike Thornton’s tutorial series on exactly this using the Avid MTRX Studio SPQ card and the free Room EQ Wizard software. Don’t worry if you haven’t got an SPQ card, most of what Mike shares works whatever your final process is going to be.

For more information on Speaker Calibration visit our Speaker Calibration Page.