Being 71 music is the only thing I can list over now. She is like a woman. Sometimes beautiful and amazing other times annoying and hard to get along with. So I guess Paul you’re my new marriage consultant. Thanks so much for all your help and support ❤
For mixing one wants a setup that is brutally honest and revealing of things that have to be fixed. At home one doesn't really want a system that shines a light on all the flaws, one wants a system that sounds engaging and musical and emotional even when the recording has flaws.
revealing flaws in the performance capture / recording / mixing process is a distinct function from that of delivering a pleasurable playback experience for consumers.
I wonder if I really want a flat speaker. Your room isn't even flat, your ears aren't flat, music isn't flat. I think there's too much preference/taste here to say anyone should 'want' flat. I listen to a pair of Martin Logan Source speakers. They are NOT flat. Reason they work is my difficult space. It eats up all of the low end and makes the ML's sound remarkably balanced. With them being hybrid electrostatic speakers the highs and mids are beautifully defined and the sound stage is holographic. Looking at their measurements though, they have 10dB's of difference. In my studio (which is mostly for digitising and remastering old recordings) I have a pair of Tannoy SRM10B's. I equalize them because they have very noticeable peaks and valleys. If I use them as a reference without the EQ, everything sounds very dull and very sub-bass heavy. Yet I never found a speaker that performed better in that space, that allows me to hear everything I need to hear, and that is still pleasant to listen to (as a nearfield, in a living room situation they sound very dull, they are just not made for that). I heard the FR30's and they are among the best speakers I ever heard. Easily top 5. Are they my taste? Not really, they are a little too energetic and bright for me. Does that mean they are closer to a real life performance? Absolutely, but I don't want real drums and a real trumpet in my living room. I want to be able to enjoy the music even when it's playing quietly in the background. So flatness, it's great for designing and building speakers. But whether you should care about it as a buyer? I personally think you shouldn't.
@@rollingtroll music is recorded flat. Add due to your preference in the speakers you buy you can control the travel base and all that. But it's always recorded flat studio monitors so you can listen to it flat so make sure you record it flat
That's nonsense all around. Yes you want a flat speaker. No, your ears are not a variable because they don't vary. If you hear an instrument in real life and then you go listen to it on a pair of speakers, did you have your ears surgically replaced in between? No? Then it literally can't be a variable. I'm not trying to be mean to you specifically, I'm just trying to highlight the absurdity of the concept so that it will stop circulating the internet like a mind virus. No, your room is not challenging to work with if you are listening to martin logans. You will never convince me that one of the hardest speakers to setup magically works in a difficult room. That's not a thing. You might need a lot of room treatment for other speakers to work, you might need to do some serious reorganizing, but you can make a pair of flat speakers work in your room just fine. Stop the cap.
As others have mentioned, monitors serve a different purpose. I’ve used Genelecs for 25 years for mixing, stereo replay and surround sound. I recently got a stereo hifi for music replay so I could relax into the music more. My fabulous Genelec 8331s are amazing but they are endlessly forensic. Now a Rega / Dali set up is so much better for enjoyment. And weirdly the Genelecs now sound better! Still use 8040s for surround sound and I think they are staying. But if you like monitors, go for it. They’re good value and can be convenient.
I'm using Psi Audio A-17Ms in my home office for several reasons. I'm listening nearfield and not moving much. My source material includes video conferences. I don't have much space for separates or extra cables. The prices of active monitors I shopped were much lower (at least 2x) than passive home audio speakers of similar performance. The monitors are also smaller despite including their own (omg good) amplifiers. I used the money I saved to acoustically treat my room. If I were to pick out a flaw in the monitors it is that they aren't finished in birds eye maple or piano black, the shape is uninteresting, and the front panel fasteners are a bit ugly.
Many studio monitors are far from "flat", and a lot of them are designed to be used at very close range ("near field"). Producers and engineers find ways of compensating for deficiencies in their equipment.
Studio monitors used mostly in very controlled environments, but home systems should be more versatile to fit in very different home acoustics but still be listenable. This is not easy. Also, the users in studios are very well trained what to expect from the sound, but most home users expect primarily an enjoying sound. A home user easily fall in love with a very non-linear loudspeaker, but studio user has no chance. So, most of the home system producers' products are not very linear, but as much as linear with an enjoyable sound. Which is mostly shifted bass and highs with a little suppressed mids. And also making a big home speaker very linear is not an easy job, neither cheap 🤩.
The comment section is amazing. Use first principals guys. An idea speaker is as follows. 1: Infinitely small point source. 2: Massless 3: Can move an infinite amount of air instantaneously. Such a speaker WILL be perfectly flat. There is no if, ands, or butts, about it. So why do studio speakers often suck? Because they generally sacrifice all 3 rules in order to force the speaker to have a flat response curve. Why do you think they all have super heavy cones and really thick surrounds? It's all damping so that they can hit their target response curve. There is no magic or mystery about it. All you need to do to make a world renowned speaker is design something that gets closer to achieving those three rules than the last guy. Trying to translate those rules into real life AND do it to a price point is exceedingly challenging which is why Paul covets Chris so much.
In the living room I use both (but not at the same time!) I have pretty good tower speakers and I have a pair of active monitor speakers (8" bass + tweeter). Both pairs sound different to each other, but I can very well enjoy both pairs of speakers for listening to music. Sometimes I get "boared" of the reproduced sound so I switch over to the other pair...
@@ridetonight33 that's the way to keep having a fresh experience with sound. I at one time had 3 listening rooms . And I believe I had at one point 43 pairs of speakers , from KLIPSCH HORNS, ALTEC LANSING voice of the theaters to MISSION, MILLER & KREISELS sub sat systems , CANTONS MAGGIES, and much more , some of my friends used to laugh there asses off when I would bounce from different sources and speakers from room to room , but what the hell , why should the sales guys only have that kinda fun ?
With good placement, any speakers can dissapear. I bought a £20 tower set of speakers and placed them in my system and they disappeared instantly! The sound, obviously, was very different but they had depth because of the placement not because of design. Not to much sound stage but i could definitely hear the music coming from behind the speakers. All this with full BHK line of electronics.
I love the myth that studio monitors have a "flat" response. Many revered monitors are anythiny but flat. Yes, some modern, active monitors using DSP are flat, but there are way more that have a distinctly uneven response.
I find it difficult to grasp the concept of "musicality" in a speaker. At first glance, describing music as "musical" seems redundant and a tautology…after all, a guitar should sound like a guitar and a piano like a piano. On the other hand, not all audiophiles aim to hear music "as intended"; I prefer to listen to music as I personally enjoy it.
I think if people who enjoy music (especially audiophiles) were to ever hear monitors in a studio setting, used to mix music, they would get a better idea of the difference and even why there is a difference.
Ok so home systems need to be “musical”. Please define musical. And if musical is good, why not make studio monitors “musical” as well? Why does one need to be one one way and one the other way?
I think “musical” is perhaps more of a mindset than something definitive. For musicality to be more definitive would require almost listeners to arrive at the same conclusion. For example, if you have Speaker A and Speaker B, both of which were designed to be more “musical”, and presented to 10 people, 6 people might say Speaker A is more musical while 4 people think it’s Speaker B. And in theory, both groups would be correct. I guess what I’m saying is that only you can determine what is musical or not musical in a speaker because only you know what you’re criteria is. It might be different from mine. Or maybe the same. The more interpretive something becomes, the less “science” can explain it.
@@housepianist well of course…it’s all subjective preference. What hasn’t been answered, however, is why it’s assumed studio monitors used to mix a recording need to be flat. Why can’t they be “musical” (or whatever sounds best to the engineer as well?
@@edd2771 Because you don’t want to have an emphasis - or de-emphasis - on a particular frequency spectrum when monitoring. For example, if you are recording/monitoring a track that has a lot of high frequency energy, listening to it on a monitor with an emphasis on that frequency band can cause an engineer to make unwarranted adjustments to it. So if that track is played back through a speaker that might be lacking in treble response, it could be perceived as lacking in that department. Technically, it wouldn’t be “flat”. I’m not sure if engineers are more qualified to determine “musicality” than you or I. Perhaps getting the best balance of sound and tonality on their “reference monitors” IS musical to them. Who’s to say how they feel at any given time during this process? So to prevent the possibility of an over-or-under emphaiszed final product, a “flat” monitor system would be preferred. Now whether it’s musical or not depends on the time of day, phases of the moon, air temperature, mood, what you ate for dinner last night… ☺️
Studio monitors generally have less dispersion than home speakers. The studio is also not really a "listening" room as during the recording the job is to get the microphone signal recorded. Mixing happens elsewhere, later and with different speakers (many times even headphones) than in the track room.
Most professional studio control rooms have at least the same volume of a typical living room. Living rooms are rarely symmetrical, have generally unbearable live acoustics, poor loudspeaker and listening positions. A home studio crammed a spare bedroom is something completely different, and has heavily compromised acoustics.
Well first of all. PS audio measure their speakers the worst way I've seen in Hi-Fi speakers. -6 dB so they can claim lower FR. And their amplifiers are measured at 1%THD and at 1 KHz 😅 and also I'm pretty sure they don't beef up the amps for European market. So since USA use 20 percent higher frequency in the power outlet, and coils work better with higher frequency, their amps are probably going to perform 10-15 percent worse in Europe. Just food for thought. And studio monitors are speakers like others, but usually they are near field, so you listen to the speaker and NOT the room. Which is also why it's not clever that octave studio use FR20 for near field. They where not made as a near field speaker. Also passive radiators should always have at least twice the cone area of the active. And also you don't get the tight response from passive radiators, but you can push a few extra low end Hz out, which is of no importance, since you should always pair a set of speakers up with a subwoofer unless you have a giant speaker, and I mean GIANT.
My studio monitors allow me to hear deep into my mixes...Theyre frustrating as they spotlight the problems in my recordings... When i play back the recordings through my "Nice Sounding" HiFi, they sound much better. The worlds most famous Studio Monitor (Yamaha NS10M) sounds horrible... If you can get music sounding half decent on those, the music will sound great on anything else.
This is a heated one. Many out there will attest to flat being the goal no matter what the application is. Danny @ GR Research preaches a gospel that NO respectable designer sets out to intentionally make an uneven responding speaker. The cabinet design and quality of the crossover parts are the culprit 90% of the time. Hes hacked up countless big brand, rave review speakers, only to expose and through QUALITY parts, correct their bumpy response. Ask any of his satisfied customers if they prefer their stock Klipsch crossovers or the corrected FLAT response ones Danny made for them and see what they tell you.
Loudspeakers without infinite baffles placed in a room with some distance to reflecting surfaces (as most speakers are) should NOT be flat. They should have baffle step compensation, and a suitable -3dB point and 12 dB/octave rolloff that suites the room size and room gain. Learn about half space vs. full space radiation and how to compensate for it.
I'm confused. At first you talk about the exceptionally flat response of the Aspens, within 2 dB, but later in the video you talk about how much you prefer a speaker that is "voiced for musicality" over a speaker designed for a flat response.
@@gotham61 frequency reponse is one thing, but measurements don’t tell the whole story. There is a HUGE amount to audio that we can’t measure and currently can’t explain, and a lot of that is voicing done by each manufacturer, their “sound”. Aspens are very flat but still carry their own voicing which would be different to any other manufacturer.
I aim for a Realistic reproduction, it gets so fuddled with all the windage in explanation. Frequency respone should be replaced with accustic reproduction - how exact a given sound bite is reproduced not a simple mono tone.
This raises the question why your own recording studio (Oktave Record), for example, doesn't use Aspen loudspeakers as monitors? Too expensive or because the same quality is available cheaper elsewhere (i.e. less than the material costs of an Aspen)?
Paul has recent videos showing the use of the Aspens in their studios. Edit: Older videos made before the Aspens went up for sale showed other brands of speakers.
Most studios have near-field, far-fields, and sometime mid-field. All fighting for position along with the computer monitors. And then if you need to sync to picture yet another large display needing the same space.
This is crazy talk. Flat is flat regardless of the room its in. I have Tyler Acoustics D1 speakers in an average size living room and they are amazing in all ways other than their huge footprint. $300 active spaekers from Guitar Center are not studio speakers ffs. And flat is flat. Paul you sound completely ignorant today in this video. Or I missed something, it happens.
"Flat is flat regardless of the room its in." - as Paul tried to tell you, "flat" is a relative term. Across the spectrum will be variations of a few dB even in the best loudspeakers, so no two speakers are identical. Additionally, loudspeakers are different in regards to radiation pattern, and any particular room will react specifically to the radiation pattern of the loudspeaker.
Your speakers will not have a perfectly flat response. Show me some evidence that they do. 7 drive units per speaker. These will have some sort of comb filtering effect at certain listening angles due to the distances between drive units, just for a start. These will interact with the room to change the frequency response at the listening position. This will be room dependant. The only person coming across as uninformed here is you. I have absolutely no doubt that your speakers sound amazing. But they will not be perfectly flat, nor will they sound identical in every room you put them in.
No that is not true. Flat is only flat with an infinite baffle and no reflecting surfaces, and no speakers are placed under those circumstances. Baffle step compensation is necessary and a full compensation for all phase shifting reflective surfaces and their comb filter peaks and dips and the room gain is necessay if a loudspeaker would have same chance of reproduce the recording honestly.
Not all studio monitors are equal. I see no reason why the Aspen FR5 could not become a good studio monitor, perhaps with a subwoofer added. Octave Records could serve some business synergy for PS Audio in the marketing of PS Audio also serving a market for quality studio monitors.
@@Fastvoice Yes, agree, active speakers rule in studios. But even for us audiophile users, active speakers also rule in our dining room, gym room, entertainment room, bed rooms and garage. I use in-wall speakers in my kitchen and bath rooms. PS Audio should think about incremental business per each PS customer for other rooms also using active speakers. A listening room is just one room for most people.
