Are your hearing what I hear?

This post was first published in May 2014 at projectstudiohandbook.com/PSHforum

We can all agree that buying the best monitors and getting them setup properly is essential. But what exactly is the best monitor and a correct setup?

Let's try and define and evaluate some objective criteria ..

1) Flat frequency response - The monitors we choose need to be balanced and revealing, accommodating the human audio spectrum with as few deviations from a flat frequency response as possible (they should reproduce the recordings with no tonal shifts).

2) Monitoring position - If our monitors are intended for near field work (where the direct sound dominates) they must be positioned such that they form an equilateral triangle with the monitoring position. For most of us this means sitting them on a shelf, stands, or the meter bridge of a mixer. They should also be positioned so that the tweeters are at ear level.

3) Supporting surface - Monitors need to be either acoustically de-coupled from the surfaces they rest on, to prevent resonant vibration affecting their performance, or sited on materials with sufficient mass to stop vibrations building up in the first place.

4) Room design - The room they are in can produce standing-waves (so called room-modes) which reflect around and skew the tonal balance, particularly in the low bass, so acoustic treatment is usually required. 

5) Auditory health - Our hearing needs to be good and undamaged. Do we know if ours is? Are we hearing what the same thing that our listeners are?

OK, all good and well, but here come the variables ..

1) Flat frequency response - How can we know if they are achieving this? We have all auditioned multiple pairs of monitors (A/B comparisons) to determine which we prefer, and despite most of them stating a flat frequency response between 20Hz and 20kHz, the differences can be HUGE!!

So we end up choosing the models we "prefer". But what good is it having 'great sounding monitors' if 90% of your listeners are going to hear your recordings on vastly inferior payback systems, most likely in-ear and in-car?

Many studio-owners resort to having several monitors with differing tonal qualities so a mix can be tested and a reasonable compromise arrived at.

2) Monitoring position - How often can we achieve an optimised and ergonomic setup? We are most likely to have a computer monitor between them, and if we have multiple pairs of monitors, some are not going to be in the ideal position. 

3) Supporting surface - Providing we have the room, this is perhaps the most achievable criteria. Hooray!

4) Room design - We've heard this mantra a million times, but how many of us project and home studio owners can realistically build or tailor a room well enough? If you've built designed and built an acoustically optimised room, congratulations, you are officially a professional and can stop reading this now!

5) Auditory health - This is tricky. We all have great hearing between approximately 6 and 16 years of age, then its a slow downhill ride. Should we mix differently for different age groups? A bit more top end for the over 50's?!

So, what should we do? Everyone has a different solution, and you know, we think that's OK. Did you know that of the two most successful mixing engineers in the business, one use cheap old Yamaha NS10's (nobody can say they have flat frequency response!) whilst the other uses budget computer AV speakers!

Given that we know, that few of our listeners (should we call them fans?) will hear our recordings as we hear them, either because they have, God forbid, superior! monitors to us, or most likely inferior (computer speakers, in club PAs, cars stereos, ear-phones etc), does it really matter how optimised our studio monitoring environment is?

Perhaps the best approach is to accept that we can never achieve a totally optimised and compatible mix, and to simply work with monitors that we love, in a room that we know (compromises and all) and then check our mixes on as many systems as possible, and fix any major problems (such as bass level imbalanced - always the tricky one).

Perhaps, in the future, we'll have a distribution system for music that can serve different mixes for different playback systems. We hope we're not around if there is, it's hard enough getting one mix right!

Have you figured out a method that works for you?

Thanks for reading.