I suggest you define what you want in terms of price. There are people would would say £50-100 is middle range, but other people would say £250-500 is mid-range.
I can't speak from any personal experience, but Kanto is a brand that gets pretty good reviews. They make powered speakers like the review below, and they also do separates as well.
The trouble with cheapo 2.1 speakers like that is that the two little speakers physically cannot reproduce mids to any real extent, which means they tend to sound tinny with some booming coming from the sub - the frequency response is terrible, basically. Spend another £40 or so and get a low-end pair of powered bookshelf speakers, you might even be able to find some nice ones second-hand if you poke around on Ebay or Gumtree. Either way you'll be much happier with the result.
>>25024 I'd say it depends what you want the speakers for. For video games and films 2.1 speakers are great because you get that booming undertone from the sub, makes explosions etc. more visceral. If music is your main focus you'd probably do better getting a pair of active bookshelf speakers, for the frequency response aspect you mention.
Yes. It's £200 to £350, the price of an entry-level pair of studio monitors.
Reviewers of professional audio equipment are vastly more knowledgeable than their hi-fi counterparts, using A/B testing and sophisticated measurement equipment rather than gut instinct and flowery prose. As a result, manufacturers of studio monitors can't get away with bullshit in a pretty box. They know that their products will be reviewed by people with degrees in engineering, not journalism.
If you're in the market, take a look at the Presonus Eris, the KRK Rokit or the Adam F5 monitors. See Sound on Sound magazine for more details. Bear in mind that studio monitors are sold singly unless stated otherwise, and that they tend to use XLR or 1/4" inputs so you may need adapters.
No speaker will perform well if it isn't properly set up. Speakers should always be at ear level and aimed at the listener. Use sturdy stands and don't shove them right against a wall.
My opinion would be that studio speakers are far too accurate to be used for extended hi-fi listening. Completely transparent sound output will be perceived as harsh to most listeners and you'll suffer fatigue.
Not any more, although they don't flatter bad recordings or low bitrate MP3s. Before the advent of computer aided design, building an accurate monitor was sufficiently difficult that listener comfort wasn't a high priority. Monitors like the Yamaha NS10 sounded bloody awful, but they were also revealing mixing tools. Today, manufacturers don't have to make that compromise. Comfort matters a great deal when you're listening to the same track on a loop for several days, as is the case in a recording studio.
There's a lot of overlap between high-end studio monitors and hifi; companies like PMC and ATC sell the same products with slightly different cosmetics to both markets. The high-end headphone market is completely dominated by pro audio manufacturers, with only a handful of distinctly hifi brands like Grado. The highest rated headphones on Head-Fi are all accurate enough for professional use.
Some specialist "grotbox" monitors like the Auratone 5c are still very harshly voiced, but they're intended to be used sparingly as a tool for balancing the midrange.
Ha! Studio monitors are sold singly for a few reasons. Fundamentally, it's because they are made with enough precision that the factory doesn't need to match pairs at the end of the production line. Any two monitors of the same model should sound exactly the same, which isn't the case with hifi speakers. This allows you to buy replacements for a damaged monitor without replacing the pair, or build arbitrarily large surround systems. Grotbox monitors are often used singly to check mono compatibility, to ensure that mixes still sound OK on portable radios.
>>25040 >Before the advent of computer aided design, building an accurate monitor was sufficiently difficult that listener comfort wasn't a high priority. Monitors like the Yamaha NS10 sounded bloody awful, but they were also revealing mixing tools. Today, manufacturers don't have to make that compromise.
Interesting, what's the difference, then? My understanding of the NS10 was that they were unique (for their time) because of their outstanding transient response, and it was that same "feature" that made them fatiguing to listen to in a studio environment, made people say they sounded "sharp" to the ears and so on (and probably why they weren't that much of a success as the hifi speaker they started off as). They didn't have particularly remarkable frequency response anyway. How do modern manufacturers deal with this, or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
The NS10 did indeed have superb transient response, largely because they were a sealed design. The air pressure inside the cabinet dampened the woofer when the input signal stopped, preventing the resonance of the speaker cone from smearing the transients. The woofer cone was also exceptionally stiff with very good damping, as an inadvertent result of a cost-cutting manufacturing decision - rather than being pressed into shape, the woofer cone was simply a flat strip of card glued into a cone.
This sealed design also meant that they had very poor bass extension and a fairly uneven frequency response. While it's true that the transient response played a part in their fatiguing sound, they also had a very shrill and trebly voicing due to poor tweeter design. It was common to see NS10s with a piece of tissue paper over the tweeters to take the edge off, which Yamaha eventually imitated with a metal grille on the later NS10M. The bass response was so poor that the bottom notes of a piano or bass guitar were almost inaudible. They had a multitude of shortcomings, but they were a superb tool for getting the midrange right.
Modern designers have the advantage of sophisticated modelling software and accurate measurement systems. Speaker design prior to the 1990s involved a great deal of guesswork and trial-and-error, hence the accidental origins of the NS10. You could do some rough calculations, but you wouldn't really know what a speaker would sound like until you built a prototype. The process was so slow and costly that manufacturers settled on designs that were merely acceptable. Today, you can tweak a design on a computer and instantly see the effect of those changes, allowing a designer to simultaneously optimise all aspects of a monitor's performance.
By rapidly iterating through many design improvements, reflex ported speakers can be designed with very good transient response while retaining good frequency response. The resonance and damping of the cabinet can be finely tuned and amplifiers can be used to electrically dampen the driver. The impact of computer-aided design is clearly visible on modern monitors - slotted ports to avoid chuffing, chamfered fascias to reduce edge diffraction and curved cabinet shapes to manage internal resonance. The drivers themselves have improved enormously for the same reason.
Today there is remarkably little difference between sealed and ported designs at the higher end of the market. A sealed design like the Neumann KH310A can achieve extremely low bass extension, while a ported design like the Event Opal can achieve superb transient response. Budget monitors are invariably ported, because the improved bass extension is worth the slight loss in transient accuracy.
>>25042 >it's true that the transient response played a part in their fatiguing sound
I guess it's this that I'm curious about. Is excellent transient response fatiguing in acoustically treated environments (like a good studio)? If it is, how do modern designs provide the benefits of accurate transient response without the fatigue it causes?
There are some really subtle psychoacoustic factors at play. Our auditory system is highly evolved to perceive the natural environment, but we're not very good at processing unnatural sounds. Listener fatigue is most common when what we're hearing doesn't match what we evolved to hear.
An analogy would be optical illusions; Some artificial stimulus can fool our visual processing systems, leading to confusion that is sometimes very uncomfortable. An example of an auditory illusion would be the Shepard tone, a sound that appears to continually rise in pitch:
Headphones are often fatiguing to listen to because of the way they present stereo information. Stereo speakers have a fairly high degree of spill, with some sound from both speakers reaching both ears. If a mix engineer isn't careful to reference against headphones, their mix may sound very unnatural on headphones, with the music seeming to come from inside your head or happening in a physically impossible acoustic space. Many high-quality headphone amps include a crossfeed setting, which blends some of the left channel into the right and vice-versa to reduce this unnatural stereo effect.
We don't fully understand why the NS10 was so unpleasant to listen to, but my understanding is that the difference in transient and frequency response is to blame. In the frequency domain the NS10s sound muffled and distorted, but in the time domain they have exeptionally high definition. There's no physical acoustic environment with those properties.
Good monitors are often described as "transparent", because they reproduce the source material almost perfectly. The lack of distortion and colouration makes these speakers inherently non-fatiguing, unless the source material being listened to is itself very unnatural.
My own monitoring system is generally a pleasure to listen to, with the exception of some mainstream pop and hip-hop music. Commercially-minded producers often design their mixes for radio, exaggerating their mix to maximise the appeal on tinny radio speakers and cheap earbuds. Good monitors reveal how weird these mixes sound. A well-known example of this phenomenon is the loudness war of dynamic range compression, but it often manifests in other ways.
Clever producers can wildly exaggerate transients using a combination of sidechained dynamics processing and distortion. This allows mixes to still sound punchy after they've been through the heavy compression used by radio broadcasters. One of my reference recordings is "Swimming Pools" by Kendrick Lamar. The snare sound is unlike anything that could occur in a natural acoustic environment; If it doesn't make me flinch, I know that there's a problem with the transient response of a system.
Of course, unnatural isn't inherently unpleasant. Trap producers have rediscovered the joys of dynamic range, to great effect. To my ears, Rustie is the absolute master of this; I first heard Slasherr on an impeccably tuned Funktion One system and wept uncontrollably. The drop has such brutal intensity that it was like an out-of-body experience.
>>25044 >I first heard Slasherr on an impeccably tuned Funktion One system and wept uncontrollably. The drop has such brutal intensity that it was like an out-of-body experience.
You sound like good people.
Bumping this thread because I need a 2.1 setup for my bedroom. I currently have some very cheap and old Edifiers which manage quite nicely with my music if I turn the sub up a little over 50%, but they're stauing i the living room. I'm not a rich man, so I don't think I can afford an amp setup; what's my best bet on today's market for something that will cope with my kind of music? For reference, "not a rich man" means I spend between £30-£40 on AKG in-ear phones every 10 months; I consider £100-£200 to be a fair price for alright speakers. I've gotten about 8 years out of these Edifiers so I'd like to get the same amount of life out of any new purchases.
(the split is because these are two rather different genres, which in my very unsophisticated understanding of sound reproduction I think does affect what you want from your speakers)
It might just be a pricing error, but GAK are currently offering a pair of Presonus Eris E5 monitors for £120. Those speakers are excellent value at twice that price. At £120, they're an outrageous bargain. I'd bite their arm off.
>>25371 Is there a sub you'd recommend for use with them or do you think they'll please me enough for the best of DeepMEDi's back catalogue on their own?
They'll go down to 53Hz, which compares very well to most domestic 2.1 systems. They have very punchy, well-controlled bass reproduction. 53Hz sounds like this:
Extremely low bass extension tends to cause real trouble in small rooms. There's not enough space to contain all the low-frequency energy, so you end up with flabby and uneven bass reproduction. Neighbours are also a big problem unless you live out in the sticks - deep bass goes through walls easily and carries over long distances, especially at night.
It depends on what you're after, really. Monitors like the Eris are accurate enough to mix records on. Most of the Big Apple Records lot used Dynaudio BM5s, which are very similar to the Eris E5. If you just want a shitload of bass, a sub might make sense.
Getting below ~50hz does not come cheap. Presonus make two matching subs, the Temblor T8 and T10. They go down to 30Hz and 20Hz respectively, and cost £269 or £309. The cheapest sub of any real quality is the Samson MediaOne 10S, which goes down to 35Hz and costs £140. Just don't blame me if all your fillings fall out and your neighbour puts a brick through your window.
>>25378 I tend to be quite polite with my neighbours, and though I do crank the little sub I have up sometimes I have a strict "headphones after 9pm, 10 at the latest" rule. I can always hear the left hand side ones arguing from my living room well into the night, but whenever I've asked either side if the music's a problem they've always said no. The only time I've had house parties I've put a note through their letterboxes with a week's advance notice.
I have also had http://www.thomann.de/gb/jbl_lsr_305.htm these recommended to me which seem to cost about the same, and that recommendation came from a mate who works in the industry but hadn't ever heard of Presonus. Any comments on JBL? (On the speakers, not his gap in knowledge - he doesn't really do home hi-fi.)
Thank you so much for your help so far. You're a gem. I think I will stick to 2.0s for now, and then look into getting myself a sub as a treat at some point in the future. For someone on my income it's definitely going to have to be a staggered purchase.
JBL have been around forever and make decent monitors. Presonus are a relative newcomer to the monitor business, but their monitors have received glowing reviews. They have a long reputation for high-quality audio interfaces and live mixing consoles.
Bear in mind that the price for those JBL monitors is per speaker, not per pair. Thomann don't have the cheapest price for the JBL LSR 305 - Absolute, Juno and GAK are selling them for £92.99 each. The JBL monitors are rear-ported, meaning they'll need to be a good distance away from a wall to perform well. The Presonus monitors are front-ported, so they'll work much better if you're tight on space.
Unless you're a trained acoustical engineer, there's only really one sensible way of working out where to put your subwoofer. It seems absurd, but it works very well.
Place the sub where your head would be in your normal listening position. Play a fast sweep test tone from 20Hz to 150Hz. Crawl around the floor with your head at floor level, listening to the test tone. When the tone sounds equally loud throughout the sweep, that's the ideal location for the sub.
There was a post here some time ago explaining how to wirelessly activate and use speakers (analog I guess, non-digital). Does anyone remember it? I think someone was asking for creative ways to combat a neighbors loud music.
