Sound monitering

Can someone please explain why speakers use to monitor sound cost 1000 dollars,when for 5 dollars i use stereo speakers and it sounds great.I think im missing something big here.

  elliot said:

Can someone please explain why speakers use to monitor sound cost 1000 dollars,when for 5 dollars i use stereo speakers and it sounds great.I think im missing something big here.

expensive monitors offer a flat sound, if you can make your music sound good on them it'll sound good on pretty much any system - as far as i know anyway. i've never really had any problems with my op shop teac speakers and 70s kenwood amp hehe.

thats basically exactly what i have, but you get told in shops that you need to buy these things for a 1000 bucks or you CANT have a sound output

You can get some decent studio monitors for $300.

The truth is, though, you can get a good sound with any speaker as long as you know how it's going to behave on other systems. I still use these shitty CompUSA speakers I bought back in 2002 for $30 and I get a pretty good sound out of them.

I have a couple nice speakers I built from a kit, but they require a power amp, which I don't have.

a good pair of monitors is extremely important if you're serious about producing professional sounding results - they offer an "uncoloured" representation of your sounds thus enabling you to mix much more accurately than on hi fi or other speakers. you certainly don't need to spend a thousand dollars though - should be able to get a decent pair of monitors for a couple of hundred.

The difference is that I can still stand listening to my paradigms at the end of an 8 hour mixing day.

Oh, and all that accuracy stuff, too. :D

your hi fi speakers are designed to make music sound good, and they use loads of little tricks to make even a crappy mix sound listenable to. this is great for listening but rubbish for mixing. If my mix sounds bad I want to know about it and more importantly I want to be able to hear exactly what it is that sounds bad. monitors can do this and a good set of monitors makes mixing music a joy.

if you know a set of speakers well then you will always be able to get ok results but if your speakers just dont really give out much of a certain frequency (very likely with cheap computer systems or cheap 5.1 systems) then you are always going to miss problems in that area. A track might sound great at home but be a horrible midrangy mess anywhere else, when you go home to fix this the track sounds ok again so you are stuck.

some monitors offer a really clear, powerful open sound and you work towards making the music sound as exciting as possible, others sound boxy and horrible with anything but a good mix. Both are good ways of working, lots of people make the track on really nice sounding monitors then mix on harsher sounding ones to iron out problems. Yamaha ns10's are a good example of the 'make a harsh track sound ok' type. they are amazing monitors but not nice to listen to music on.

krk v8's are an example of a sounds good, make it great speakers.

if your mix sounds good on these speakers it will sound pretty good (or as good as it can get) on anything from radio speakers, big systems, cheap hi fi's or audiophile stereos. thats why we use monitors!

I used to only use my rubbish computer speakers to mix, and I knew them well so I got some ok results but they never sounded 'like the pro's' and I couldn't work out why, I came to the conclusion that i was just not very good. then I got monitors and it suddenly became EASY, all the reasons why my tracks had sounded a little below good were suddenly obvious!

I think you are missing something indeed. And you'll know what when you get yourself a pair of studio monitors ;)

Don't have to be expensive at all.

  elliot said:

Can someone please explain why speakers use to monitor sound cost 1000 dollars,when for 5 dollars i use stereo speakers and it sounds great.I think im missing something big here.

one day, you'll use good speakers, and you'll be like... oh. i get it now.

  elliot said:

for 5 dollars i use stereo speakers and it sounds great.

I wanna know where I can get great sounding speakers for $5 (or even £5 !)

  mcbpete said:

  elliot said:

for 5 dollars i use stereo speakers and it sounds great.

I wanna know where I can get great sounding speakers for $5 (or even £5 !)

op shop d00d!