4 ms·

I’m always a bit flummoxed by guidelines like this being taken as gospel. Sure I will start with the manufacture recommended placement if my room allows, but at

by S_A_P 6y ago

I’m always a bit flummoxed by guidelines like this being taken as gospel. Sure I will start with the manufacture recommended placement if my room allows, but at the end of the day I have to hear the speakers so if it sounds good it is good rules for me. There really is no wrong if you like what you hear. Sure a rear port placed an inch from the wall will alter the response and likely cause chuffing as the air rushes in and out, but that falls under common sense to some degree. I guess one of the core tenets of “hifi” used to be flat frequency response from 20hz-20khz and no added coloration from the reproduction system. That’s fine but often times today’s music sounds crappy under those parameters. People like hyped bass and treble with a scooped midrange. That’s okay. The parameters shift slightly when using studio monitoring to create a mix for music that needs to translate to other playback environments but even then a perfectly flat response is not necessary. If you know that your monitors are bass shy and increasing the bass will make it sound muddy on the majority of other systems then that is a data point you keep in mind. Learning the quirks of your monitoring setup is very important in this scenario. The point being that the guidelines are a starting point, not the rule.

johnvanommen 6y ago
According to the research done by Harman/Samsung, listeners generally prefer a curve that's gently sloping by one decibel per octave. IE, if you want a pleasing sound, a loudspeaker that's playing 90dB at 100Hz should be playing 83dB at 16,800Hz. And the response curve should be consistent from point A to point B. This recommendation can be impacted by the power response of the speaker, but that's another subject...
munificent 6y ago
> at the end of the day I have to hear the speakers so if it sounds good it is good rules for me. There really is no wrong if you like what you hear. There are two very different goals that are easy to conflate and that the article isn't very clear about: 1. If you are a music listener or music producer focusing on making music, you just want a room that sounds great to you. If you're making music, you want a sound that inspires you and gets the creative juices flowing. 2. If you are a mixing or mastering engineer or a music producer focusing on polishing and mixing your work, you want a room that gives you insight on how the audio will sound in a wide variety of listening environments. Your goal is to get the song sounding as good on as many people's speakers, headphones, and rooms as possible and your own personal setup is a proxy for that. For example, if you only have a couple of tiny speakers that don't go below 50 Hz, your song may have subbass that you literally cannot hear. But when someone with a subwoofer plays the song, all of that comes out. If it's too loud or out of tune, the song sounds like trash, but you have no way of knowing. So the goal is a monitor setup that is relatively neutral so that the song doesn't sound better to you than it will to others. You want a fairly flat response so that you aren't inadvertently EQ-ing the song to cancel out peaks and valleys in your room because then that will imbalance the sound in other rooms. And you want to cover the full frequency range so you can hear everything others will be able to hear. If the songs sounds great in your room, but it sounds like garbage for everyone not in your room, it definitely is not great. Most articles about monitor placement tend to assume the goal is 2 more than 1. These days, the line is blurry because many musicians and producers are also doing a lot of the mixing.

by S_A_P 6y ago

johnvanommen 6y ago

According to the research done by Harman/Samsung, listeners generally prefer a curve that's gently sloping by one decibel per octave. IE, if you want a pleasing sound, a loudspeaker that's playing 90dB at 100Hz should be playing 83dB at 16,800Hz. And the response curve should be consistent from point A to point B. This recommendation can be impacted by the power response of the speaker, but that's another subject...

munificent 6y ago

> at the end of the day I have to hear the speakers so if it sounds good it is good rules for me. There really is no wrong if you like what you hear. There are two very different goals that are easy to conflate and that the article isn't very clear about: 1. If you are a music listener or music producer focusing on making music, you just want a room that sounds great to you. If you're making music, you want a sound that inspires you and gets the creative juices flowing. 2. If you are a mixing or mastering engineer or a music producer focusing on polishing and mixing your work, you want a room that gives you insight on how the audio will sound in a wide variety of listening environments. Your goal is to get the song sounding as good on as many people's speakers, headphones, and rooms as possible and your own personal setup is a proxy for that. For example, if you only have a couple of tiny speakers that don't go below 50 Hz, your song may have subbass that you literally cannot hear. But when someone with a subwoofer plays the song, all of that comes out. If it's too loud or out of tune, the song sounds like trash, but you have no way of knowing. So the goal is a monitor setup that is relatively neutral so that the song doesn't sound better to you than it will to others. You want a fairly flat response so that you aren't inadvertently EQ-ing the song to cancel out peaks and valleys in your room because then that will imbalance the sound in other rooms. And you want to cover the full frequency range so you can hear everything others will be able to hear. If the songs sounds great in your room, but it sounds like garbage for everyone not in your room, it definitely is not great. Most articles about monitor placement tend to assume the goal is 2 more than 1. These days, the line is blurry because many musicians and producers are also doing a lot of the mixing.