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In Reply to: RE: John Atkinson - Studio Monitors vs Audiophile Speakers posted by Jeff Starr on June 15, 2016 at 12:39:07
then you don't really know what you are hearing in the recording studio!
That's the long and short of it.
Mark Waldrep has his opinions and is welcome to them, but his position is a good example of why not all mastering jobs are the best possible. This is a pity because this is not due to a lack of skill on the part of the mastering engineer. Its just that they really don't know what they are hearing.
I've seen many that master on cheaper speakers with the idea that the music is going to play on a cheap system (car stereo, boom box) and so the cheap speakers are used to try to simulate that. Its a flawed concept; the problem being that the cheap speakers you use to master with likely do not have the same flaws as the cheap systems others are using, so not only do you not know what your mastered work sounds like, its likely that it has synergistic flaws that will be seen as aberrations elsewhere. We've seen far too much of this in the industry in the last 25 years!!
Still others use 'pro audio speakers' without a good idea of what this really means. Quite often pro audio speakers are designed to handle high power/high volume levels while not necessarily being the most accurate or detailed. The simple fact is the best studio monitor is also going to be an excellent speaker by any measure and if you look at the better studios they have no fear of using 'high end' loudspeakers.
The bottom line is that you just get the best playback you can so that you don't screw up the recording you are making by making stupid mistakes that you can't hear.
While I am not saying to ignore Mr. Waldrep entirely, I am saying that he is off-base on this one and no mistake.
(FWIW I run an audio manufacturing operation of 40 years as well as a recording studio which includes an LP mastering operation)
Follow Ups:
….or it goes back at least 25 years as you observe. Back in the March 1994 issue of Stereophile, J. Gordon Holt wrote an article titled: Space, the Final Frontier. In it he observed that speakers with a tilt towards the bass (for "warmth") plus a treble peak (for "detail") were tending to get rave reviews compared to similar speakers tending to more of a flat type of response which were tending to get luke warm reviews. A Weslake monitor speaker, which got a luke warm review, was cited as an example and compared with some speakers which had the colorations JGH described. Now I might like the speakers with the bass tilt/treble peak more than the Weslakes, but I would not call them more accurate than the Weslakes in view of John Atkinson's frequency response graphs of all the speakers JGH compared in the article. It would be nice if the term "accurate" had become more accurately used following the Space… article, but luckily nobody was holding their breath back in '94.
I have to reluctantly admit that I generally agree with John Atkinson's take on the original post that a good engineer can listen around certain tendencies of the monitors if they are understood by the engineer. However the Mercury Living Presence recordings have been highly regarded for decades, but they were mastered over Altec V.O.T. horns, which should seemingly horrify JGH and JA from comments they have made.
Paul
Ralph, what records have you mastered that I can go out and buy?
….who is in Minnesota I believe, while I'm in Chicago. As this post is sinking down in time, it may not get noticed.
Paul
Ralph says:
"Still others use 'pro audio speakers' without a good idea of what this really means. Quite often pro audio speakers are designed to handle high power/high volume levels while not necessarily being the most accurate or detailed. The simple fact is the best studio monitor is also going to be an excellent speaker by any measure and if you look at the better studios they have no fear of using 'high end' loudspeakers."
I'll point out a counterpoint: There are monitor speakers that are far more honest and true to the music than most $50k+ audiophile speakers.
Having to make a choice between the usual suspect review honey speakers versus top line pro speakers, I'd take the top line pro speakers as a whole. Course, I have no horse in the game as I make neither speakers nor amps.
I can't figure out how you're disagreeing with him. He says "Don't be led astray by those that promote personal flavors of compromised sound because they think that their marketing people will be able to capture more sales" and that he'd buy the most accurate and revealing speakers he's ever heard if he were to buy new monitors today. It sounds like you both have the same opinion but different pet peeves. He finds outrageously expensive but still inaccurate speakers annoying and you find people who reject "high-end" speakers completely annoying.
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