It seams that every review I read about a studio monitor is complete crap. It's as if the guy doing the review completely missed the point of the review. I'm not saying that all studio monitor reviews are flawed, I'm just saying that I find them useless 90% of the time. It's simple. If a carpenter buys a new saw, the only thing that matters is the quality of work and the efficiency in which he performed his work. You take a look at the cabinet he built. Did switching to the new saw improve the quality or efficiency in constructing the cabinets? Nothing else matters. The same applies to studio monitors. Reviews that say that this frequency was cloudy and this was present don't mean a damn thing to anyone I know. Those words are about as useful as the toothbrush your mom used to clean the toilet (for brushing teeth). Actually, those descriptions are greatly preferred to ?I put my favorite reference cd in and it sounded great?. Well no shit!!! It's your favorite cd and it probably cost a million dollars to record (maybe not). A great sounding studio monitor might just force you to make crappy sounding mixes. Read on.

The only thing that matters in a studio monitor is the final product. When you slap your cd in the car or home stereo system, does it sound better than it did with your other studio monitors? If it doesn't sound better, the monitor didn't help. It's as simple as that. The way your ears intermingle with a studio monitor is a personal relationship that can take years to develop fully. You definitely have to learn a set of studio monitors to understand how they are going to translate in the real world. However, sometimes you have the same problems over and over in just about every mix that you do. Maybe switching monitors is the right solution.

My Current Studio Monitoring Situation

After owning my set of studio monitors (which I paid about $1200 for the pair) for over 4 years, it seams that every project I record comes out sounding like it has too much 400-600 Hz in it. I tell myself to account for this, but it's very tough to make yourself push the parametric EQ further than it needs to in order to sound good. In the end, I end up listening on the other systems and often disappointed because the same old problems persists.

I think the problems I'm having with my monitoring are due to the way that I mix. The studio monitors are what I call ?hifi?. When I think of ?hifi?, I think of the sound on movies. It's always nice and bright and never dull. These monitors have that same type of sound to my ears. That seams great, but in my case it's terrible.

How Studio Monitors Work

Whatever a studio monitor gives you is probably backwards from how your mixes will sound. If this doesn't make sense to you, let me explain. Let's pretend that I secretly let you borrow some new condensers for drum overheads. Then let's say that I secretly put an EQ on your monitors and boosted the 10Khz by about 6dB. In other words, I've made your monitoring system MUCH brighter than it was and you are working with new mics so you are not even sure what you are listening to. You'll quickly reach for the EQ and knock 10Khz down by 6dB or so (assuming that the overheads were perfect to begin with). Then you take it the mix out to your car and you hear the dullest mix in your life.

So, an excessively bright studio monitor will force you to take high end out of your mix and therefor end up with a dull sounding mix. The same goes for all the other frequencies as well.

What Studio Monitor Do You Need
Based on my situation, a hifi sounding monitor is the last thing that I need. In fact, since I want to make sure that my mixes aren't boxy and tubby sounding, I need a monitor that is boxy and tubby. My mixing will counter this and I should end up with a better sounding mix in a shorter amount of time.