While it makes sense that the budget studio monitor market is so profitable, I've got bigger aims.

Does anyone out there who owns a set of budget studio monitors (let's just say in the $500 and under category) feel confident that their mixes will will translate well to the outside world?

Respond to my thread here:
Budget Studio Monitors: Do They Work?

When I originally bought all my recording gear, I selected the Mackie HR 824s. At the time, just about everyone had something good to say about them. Fast forward 6 years later. You still find people here and there who love them, but I'd say that most of the fascination with the Mackie HR824 has moved on to some other “hip” new studio monitor. Because I knew that there were quite a few professionals who weren't overly excited by the Mackie HR824s (but I knew some who were) I always wondered if they were the right monitor for me. Then again, I knew there were some great engineers still using the Mackie HR 824s.

The Breakthrough
About 3 weeks ago I had the huge breakthrough that allowed me, for the first time, to feel like I could trust my Mackies. It didn't require any gear upgrades and in fact, the solution was sitting out in my yard covered in mud and leaves. (That's another story!)

The Results
I did a mix about a week ago that is clearly the best mix in my life. Ironically, this was the “first draft” where I get lazy and don't really try to over think anything. I simply got the drums to smack using some compression, got the bass guitar to work with the kick drum, and did very minor eq or effects elsewhere. I know the mix took me less than an hour. I don't think I even used any automation.

When I played the mix on my computer speakers, I feel like I had succeeded. No, the recording isn't 100% perfect, but for the first time in my life the decisions I made in the control room hold up when we listen elsewhere.. I 100% attribute that to my studio monitors being drastically more trustworthy.

Since every mix has sounded better and better with my more honest monitoring system, I've found that tracking is MUCH easier (most of the time). Instead of a link in the chain being a guessing game, I now know immediately if the tone is going to work on other systems.. That's just one less thing I have to be unsure about. I kind of feel like that dude with the “male enhancement” drug. I'm always smiling. I feel like that hair club for men weuss who was insecure about his baldness and then got it fixed. (Yes, I am balding myself. No, it does not rank in my top 10,000 problems). I just feel confident now when I say “Yes, that guitar sound works”. This has lead to exponential increases in recording quality. I'm talking about the extra confidence I have in my studio monitoring.

Evidence Of More Accurate Monitoring
Yesterday I recorded bass tracks. The bass player was damn good and played a Schector bass which I LOVED. I kept hearing this boominess in the upper bass / lower mids. It was driving my crazy. It actually took me about 10 minutes to calm it down without killing the tone of the bass. I would have NEVER heard this in my previous setup. I've never had that hard of time calming the boominess of the bass guitar. Let me rephrase that.. I've never had a studio monitoring rig that would be up front and honest with me from the beginning that said “Brandon, we are friends and all, so I need to be the first person to tell you this. Your bass guitar tone is a little much in the 100Hz range.” In the past, my studio monitor situation was the friend that would pound my girlfriend that first chance he got. (That's an odd picture) My old studio monitor situation would say “Brandon, it sounds good to me” even though he knew better. I'd have to wait for my home stereo friend to pull me aside and tell me about the problems after the fact.

Now that my studio monitors are illustrating problems up front, I'm able to make changes when I should. DURING TRACKING! The bass player knew exactly how hard he could dig in. If the tone got a little muddy, he knew to back down. We ended up doing quite a bit of tweaking on the bass itself to get it to sound right in the studio monitors. When I listen to that bass on my computer speakers, it sounds exactly like I wanted!

So, I just wanted to share my excitement of my improved studio monitoring situation. I wish I would have really taken the time to get my monitors right years ago. I probably wouldn't be so bald, today!

Brandon

I've been working hard on writing my recording book, as some of you may already know. I came to the part where I was discussing various tips to improve the studio monitoring environment. At one point, I wrote that your favorite recordings shouldn't sound too “hi fi” or mid scooped in your monitors or you mixes will come out sounding lo-fi / mid heavy. This is part of the “Inverse Theory”.

It occurred to me that:
My favorite recordings sound a tad too hi-fi / mid scooped for my tastes on my studio monitors
I once was able to get my Mackies to much more neutral (which most people would consider to be a “bad” thing, but is a great thing for studio monitors.
When I panned the sound of a mono instrument changed drastically from left to right

I was able to get my Mackies, which tend to be ultra hi-fi in the way I had them for the previous year, to highlight boomy, boxy, and unfocused portions of my mix. This is great. Beginners like to talk about the “detail” in a studio monitor, but what about the “obvious, BIG issues” like boominess and boxiness. Is your studio monitors illustrating this?

My Studio Monitoring Solution:
I placed my studio monitors on a cheap, plastic card table. Yes, you heard me. It's a $30 card table I bought years ago and actually left outside for a month. I had to wash all the leaves and dirt off of it (in the bathtub....the woman was happy!!) I was using heavy duty speaker stands. Okay, they weren't exactly “speaker stands”. They were stacked up cinder blocks! ($6 for 6 bricks seemed like a better solution than $150 for “professional” speaker stands.

My Previous Measurements
I had spent every eweekend for a month finding the spot in the room with the smoothest frequency response. However, I had made a HUGE mistake. I was using one speaker in one position for my tests. I'm confident that I found the smoothest part of the room, but I didn't take into account that the other studio monitor would be setting in a another position that was far from ideal. When I panned a low frequency instrument's mono track from side to side, the differences were enormous! The results weren't what I had hoped for after all that measuring.

Throwing Out The Measurements
I said “Screw the measurements”. I decided that I would be better off finding a spot where my studio monitors sounded as close as possible. Instead of using a test microphone, I was going to simply pan mono tracks back and forth until I found what I wanted. I couldn't imagine the phase cancellation and obvious soundstage issues of bass heavy instruments drifting to one side. It makes sense that if two studio monitors play back a mono signal in more or less the same way, they should be fairly accurate anyway. What are the odds that studio monitors would be equally destroyed by the room when 4' from each other? It must be a good spot!

Using Symmetry Again
A fundamental of placing studio monitors it place them equadistant from the walls. In other words, the speakers should be centered in the room so that the each monitor is the same distance from it's walls as the other speaker.

I ditched this concept last time when doing all my test measurements and I have a feeling it was the main reason for my problems when I turned off the measurement software and turned on the second studio monitor.

The Results
After placing my studio monitors on a card table and moving them to a location that used symmetry, the results were significant. I was able to hear WAY more in the low mids region. In fact, a guitar that I had recorded the day before in my previous recording location now sounded.....weird and crappy. I would not have went with the guitar tone / mic placement I did on my new monitor location. So that seems to say a lot right there.

The mixes I've done so far have turned out fairly well. Boxiness and boominess are not a problem at all! This is GREAT news! Now I'm mixing with too much kick drum, but I'm also allowing more bass guitar meat (which is something I've never really allowed myself to do in my previous locations).

I'm VERY happy with the way my mixes are translating at the moment. I'll have to find a bass heavy spot in the room to tell me when I have too much low end, but other than that, I may not need to dump $2,500 on new studio monitors!