When you get your new monitors home and set them up, placing them
exactly where your ears want them, the learning process begins as you
gain experience attending to your audio, you will learn to improve your
mixes. You'll know your monitor's blind spots and will learn to check on
other systems. The more you do that, the more your monitors become a
true reference. Remember this fact: reference is not a quality of a box,
but a quality of your attention and experience.
A good monitor
does not artificially exaggerate frequencies. You do not want a speaker
that sounds like a 'disco smile.' That's where the bass and the treble
are boosted and the mids are cut. They call it a 'smile' because that's
how it looks on a graphic equalizer. Lots of people really like that
sound. If that is the sound that you're after, then use your EQ and go
for it. Then it might actually translate on other systems. But if you
speakers make that automatically, you mix will be shown lacking in bass
and high transients.
Nearly everyone seems to agree that one
needs a "near field" monitor to accurately assess the music they are
creating. A near field monitor is one that you keep pretty close to you,
typically between 3-5 feet. The idea here is that the music we hear is
dramatically altered by room acoustics. Go try a little experiment. Take
any speaker and put it in the corner of a room. You will hear bass
resonating through the room that does not exist when the speaker is in
the middle of the room.
Your near-field monitors should be
placed about 6'-10' apart, directly centered on your position at the
console. The centerlines of the speakers should be angled together,
converging on a spot about a foot behind your head. Some people like to
spread their near-fields even more, to emphasize the stereo image.
Here's the real skinny on the monitors that you choose for your
home studio. If your music is successful, people will listen to it in
the car, on boom boxes on their Walkman, on the radio
with the 3 inch speaker, in listening booths
a CD stores, on TV, and every once in a while, someone will hear it on
good speakers. The real truth is in the understanding of how your mix on
your monitors translates to other listening conditions. This means that
you have to really 'know' your monitors. The main thing is to get a set
you are comfortable with, that you can listen to all day. Your ears will
actually learn the monitor. As you check your mix on other systems, you
will learn about your system's deficiencies and compensate.
There is a school of thought that says a monitor shouldn't really be
flat. This school of thought holds that instead of buying the flattest
response monitor that you can find, you should instead buy a monitor
that you like to listen to, that your favorite music sounds great on,
and then match your efforts in the mix to produce that sound you love.
Others, however, say if certain frequencies are over represented, you
will under-represent them in your mix. What this means is that, whatever
your monitors are good at is exactly what your mix will be bad at. What
it all boils down to is that the results you get when listening to your
mixes on systems other than what you recorded them on has less to do
with the monitor itself and more to do with the experience of the
producer.
If you don't have a console at home that will allow
you to flip polarity, you can do a little experiment that will allow you
to put your speakers out of phase and hear the effects of 'out of
phase.' Simply go behind one of your speakers and switch the wires from
positive to negative and negative to positive. This will put one speaker
out of phase and also your system. Then sit between the speakers and
listen to your favorite CD. Then flip the speaker back again and
compare. Notice the difference? Putting both speakers out of phase is
called being absolutely out of phase and it will sound normal to your
ear. This is because both speakers are out of phase and have nothing to
relate to. The other way, where only one speaker is out of phase, is
called being relatively out of phase.