Surround sound studio monitors full#

Especially for mastering, it's important to be able to pick up rumble in areas as low as 20Hz. The job of a mastering engineer is to make a client's track sound amazing both on typical home stereo systems as well as on massive PA systems used at concert arenas and outdoor festivals. Not all studio monitors are made equal, and generally, mastering studios want the best monitors money can buy. Sometimes mastering studios will use the same monitors as mixing engineers, but more often than not, their equipment will be a lot more expensive and much bigger in size. So far, we've only talked about studio monitors in the context of mixing, but they are also needed for mastering. You'll still want to listen to the finished track in the car or on your friend's home stereo speakers, but overall you'll spend a lot less time fine-tuning things because the foundation of your mix will be solid. That's not to say that testing your final mix in different environments won't be necessary. If you can get your mix to sound right on your studio monitors, chances are quite high that it will be just as good on any other system as well. While consumer speakers mask the errors, studio monitors reproduce the sound exactly how it is without any coloration.

Studio monitors allow you to hear everything that's wrong with your mix because they have a flat frequency response. Wouldn't it make more sense to own a pair of speakers that sound neutral and add no color? Luckily for us, this is precisely the reason why studio monitors exist. It would be quite impractical and very time consuming if the only way to make sure your mix is right was to test it on a multitude of different sound systems. As a result, when you switch to a different device with another custom EQ profile or maybe no profile at all, your track will sound completely different too. If you want to get a bit more technical, consumer speakers have built-in EQ profiles where specific frequencies are boosted for reasons known only to the makers of the speakers. Often the speakers add their own color to the music and make it sound better than it is. Most consumer speakers are designed to make the music sound more pleasant to the human ear in an average listening environment. If you want to never fall into this pitfall again, you will definitely need a pair of studio monitors to mix your tracks. Well, guess what? You just got tricked by those speakers on your table. Meanwhile, on the very same phone, the reference tracks sound perfectly fine. The hi-hats are too sharp and pierce the ear the snares are too thin, and the bass is either overpowering or non-existent. The horror starts when you play the finished mix on your phone and realize that everything sounds as if you haven’t spent any time on mixing at all. Your logic here is that if you can get your mix to sound as good as the commercial reference tracks, then it doesn't matter what speakers you use (we've all made this mistake before). During this process, you use the cheap speakers that stand on your desk or, perish the thought, your laptop speakers. You make a track, and after listening to a couple of reference songs, you try to get your work to sound as close as possible to the reference material. Here's a scenario that you've probably experienced in your music production career. The advantage of speakers like these is that you can play your mixes exactly how they will sound on every consumer speaker, whether it's a car stereo, boombox, home surround sound, or even a tin can. If they are placed too close or too far away, the sound will be different and the volume will need to be adjusted for optimum quality. Monitors are also designed to be placed a certain distance from the listener with the ideal distance being 2 to 4 feet. Some speaker designs can make a subwoofer sound ten times louder or a quiet sound completely inaudible just by their design. They also are designed with the goal of being as non-reactive as possible to the sound.

Noise in the signal gets added by the electronics powering the speakers, so studio monitors have very high quality electronics with as little noise as possible. While many speakers are designed primarily to enhance the bass and treble frequencies, making drums and cymbals sound louder and vocals sound clearer, 'full range' speakers attempt to give a more accurate reproduction of the source material.

Surround sound studio monitors full#

Studio monitors are speakers designed to reproduce the full frequency range of audio sources without coloring the sound.