fattymatthews Posted February 24, 2008 Share Posted February 24, 2008 Hey logic goers. This is not so much a logic question as a technical. Perhaps someone can point me in the right direction to a sound/speaker/monitor setup forum. I just bought a new set of Mackie HR824MKII 2-Way Active Studio Monitors. They sounded great in the shop (was choosing between the Mackies and the yamaha msp7 speakers) However, when i got them home the bass levels sound nothing like it did in the shop. Its not until i stand on the other side of the room until i can feel the bass or hear it. I know that speakers will sound different in different locations and environments and different room sizes but was wondering if anyone had any good suggestions on how to get the best sound out of these suckers. The room i have them setup in is about 11x10 feet in size so fairly small. I have the speakers pushed up against the wall on my desk. They are currently running of a MAudio firewire solo interface (could this be a factor, is this an Ok Audio interface?) Any suggestions and help much appreciated. Have just forked out a lot of money on these suckers and want to be happy with what i purchased. Perhaps the Yamaha's would have been better? Peoples thoughts and suggestions much appreciated. Hopefully there are some sound gurus out there that can give me some advise. Cheers all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shivermetimbers Posted February 24, 2008 Share Posted February 24, 2008 With all that money you spent on those 'suckers' you should seriously consider reading your manual. There is more to those monitors than turning the knob to '11' and expecting pure awesomeness. All those controls on the back were put there for a reason. Also look into some acoustic foam treatment for your room. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fattymatthews Posted February 24, 2008 Author Share Posted February 24, 2008 cheers for the reply. Yeah i have checked out the manual, have set the knobs to what i believe are the correct positions. Room padding might be a good option. Thanks again Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anti-banausic Posted February 24, 2008 Share Posted February 24, 2008 Hey logic goers. This is not so much a logic question as a technical. Perhaps someone can point me in the right direction to a sound/speaker/monitor setup forum. I just bought a new set of Mackie HR824MKII 2-Way Active Studio Monitors. They sounded great in the shop (was choosing between the Mackies and the yamaha msp7 speakers) However, when i got them home the bass levels sound nothing like it did in the shop. Its not until i stand on the other side of the room until i can feel the bass or hear it. I know that speakers will sound different in different locations and environments and different room sizes but was wondering if anyone had any good suggestions on how to get the best sound out of these suckers. The room i have them setup in is about 11x10 feet in size so fairly small. I have the speakers pushed up against the wall on my desk. They are currently running of a MAudio firewire solo interface (could this be a factor, is this an Ok Audio interface?) Any suggestions and help much appreciated. Have just forked out a lot of money on these suckers and want to be happy with what i purchased. Perhaps the Yamaha's would have been better? Peoples thoughts and suggestions much appreciated. Hopefully there are some sound gurus out there that can give me some advise. Cheers all. I wouldn't worry that you made the wrong choice in monitors. Room treatment is soooo important in getting a good monitoring situation. I am definitely no expert as I just recently asked a similar question in the Control room area, but here is my effort to help (I could be WAY off): 1) Having your monitors against a wall is a bad idea. Try to have at least 4-6 inches from a wall. 2) They should form an equilateral triangle from your head when you are in your normal listening position. 3) As far as height, the height of your head should be level with the area in between the tweeters and the woofers. Hope that helps a little. I haven't yet invested in room treatment, but one thing you can do is burn your tracks to disc, and then try them in different environments. Then you get to know YOUR room, and how it translates to other areas. Best, AB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fattymatthews Posted February 24, 2008 Author Share Posted February 24, 2008 Hey AB Cheers heaps for that info, its all good. At the mo my seat is rather low, so its level with the woofer, time for a new chair perhaps! Thanks heaps for your advice mate. Im sure if its incorrect others will comment! Have fun dude. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dkgross Posted February 24, 2008 Share Posted February 24, 2008 Frankly, I'd take those Mackies back. For pretty much the same $$$, you can get the JBL LSR's and run their built in Room Correction application. Let the speakers do the work for ya. I got rid of my Mackies as soon as I heard the JBL's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CplusE Posted February 24, 2008 Share Posted February 24, 2008 Tisk Tisk dkgross, let him enjoy his speakers. LOL fattymatthews did say "However, when i got them home the bass levels sound nothing like it did in the shop." I have listen to the HR82MKII, and they do sound good also bass heavy but not a crisp as the JBL with out treatment. I can go on and on. But with concern of base with the JBL you would have to get the tube to get that base I think fattymatthews is looking for in his HR82MKII. Another thing if anyone could help me out on is treatment for my room. I have no clue how to treat my room. Are there any places that can help if I drew my room and they can provide me info on what to get because I know I have not yet heard the highest quality of my JBL yet. Treatment would be amazing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fader8 Posted February 24, 2008 Share Posted February 24, 2008 Tisk Tisk dkgross, let him enjoy his speakers. LOL Sorry to disagree with you, but I totally agree with Dave! Another thing if anyone could help me out on is treatment for my room. I have no clue how to treat my room. Are there any places that can help if I drew my room and they can provide me info on what to get because I know I have not yet heard the highest quality of my JBL yet. Treatment would be amazing. Why don't you start out with telling us what you've already done, measurements, etc. What do you think the problem is? Do you have a measurement microphone? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brinnbacka Posted February 24, 2008 Share Posted February 24, 2008 The JBL's have only one filter common to all the speakers in the system, and only operating under 700Hz. If you want to hear speakers that can actually do something significant I'd recommend K+H O410 or Genelec's DSP series. Also it's very easy to save a lot of money just by reading manufacturer's specs and making decisions on that basis. Or visit your delaer and borrow them home for a while. But do not make decisions based on listening experiences in an unknown situation. And treat the room correctly! Lots of info at www.johnlsayers.com forums... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kgottlieb Posted February 24, 2008 Share Posted February 24, 2008 Purchase Mixing With Your Mind by Michael Paul Stavrou. Read chapter 2 and the Ribbon Effect. Speakers should be away from walls, and resting on isolators like Auralex pads to isolate from your desk. Th base frequencies are being absorbed into your desk. Pros often mix at low volumes on mono s#!+ speakers. What's important is understanding how your monitors and room color the sound you are hearing so that you can compensate for holes in your stereo field. I own HR824s and I have learned to compensate in the mix for the base deficiencies for my particular room so that the bass translates well on a variety of speaker systems. You made a good purchase, IMO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ski Posted February 24, 2008 Share Posted February 24, 2008 I'm on the fence about my Mackies. I've had them for years but over that time I've found that the high end is hyped, at least within my studio listening environment. The low end response is very decent, very decent indeed. But my room suffers from an 80Hz dip (it's 19x25 with 12' cathedral ceilings) so I've learned to compensate for the bass, and am now learning to compensate for the high end. Still, I'm in the market for something else. I'll probably keep the Mackies, tho, as it pays to have mutiple pairs of speakers when mixing to get different perspectives on the sound. Compensating for sonic deficiencies in a studio space is a skill that full time recording engineers are very familiar with. Even in some multi-$100,000 control rooms there can be problems. Engineers who worked in such rooms enough would sometimes find -- from listening to their mixes outside of those rooms -- where the sonic strengths and weaknesses lay and compensate accordingly on future mixes they did in those rooms. Perfect example was a now defunct studio called Platinum Island in NYC. Several engineers told me that one room (I think it was "B") sucked up bass, so they'd compensate by putting more bass in the mix than they might do in some other room. Sure enough, their mixes translated well to the outside world. Putting up things like acoustic treatments in your room (like auralex) will NOT help at all with bass frequency absorption. They're good for quelling reflections, high end reflections. You should sit in your mix position and play a loop of a dry rimshot or very short, dry snare. If you hear flutter in the room, try and identify where it's coming from. Likely it'll be high frequency sound that's bouncing between the ceiling and the walls (nice 90º angles there). In that case you might consider putting up foam along the wall/ceiling junction (as though it were molding) to absorb that kind of flutter. Bare, hard walls or closet doors that are at a 90º or 180º angle to your speakers will also reflect sound, mostly highs and mids. They're another place to consider foam. But bass frequencies are a whole other matter. It's very difficult and expensive to treat bass anomalies in one's room, and that's where the JBL speakers might do you a world of good. I'm considering those myself. As a stopgap measure, I bought a 31-band graphic EQ and put it on the output of my board, feeing my powered monitors. I had an engineer come in with an RTA and adjust the EQ to compensate for the low frequency dip and some other problems. (I need to get him back in here because, stupid me, I brushed against the EQ and changed the settings...). Anyway... thats another choice you have. With respect to the JBL's, though, they come with a mic and RTA software. I've heard nothing but good things about the JBL's. But every speaker, even JBL's, have a sound of their own. I've never been a big fan of JBL bottom end, but because of the RTA feature and wanting to solve the problem in my room without the use of the graphic EQ I'm considering them. It's a potential compromise, but then again, mixing is always a compromise. There is no such thing as the perfect room and the perfect speakers. Boy, I'm sure writing a lot, aren't I? LOL!! Anyway, if you like the sound of your Mackies, stick with them for now and try some of the remedial tactics described above and in other people's posts. One way or another you may still find yourselve having to learn the skill of compensating in your mixing technique. It's not a hopeless situation, even with the Mackies. It'll just take some time to get everything as right as it can be in your room. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fattymatthews Posted February 26, 2008 Author Share Posted February 26, 2008 Wow! Just logged back onto this forum thread after a couple of days. Cheers everyone for the great advice and input. In the end i took the Mackies back, i found them to be quiet muddy in the mids and i I was just not a happy chappy. Especially spending that amount of pinger$ on them. I ended up getting the Yamaha MSP7's which i am really happy with. Good clarity in the highs and Mids and a punchy bass without it being to heavy in the lows. They certainly sound a lot better than the Blue Sky 2.1 media desks that i had. Couldn't handle having a sub on my mixing setup which is how the blue skys were. There is a lot of reading and good information in this thread, cheers everyone for their input. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brinnbacka Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 The dips in your frequency spectrum should never be compensated with eq as they occur because of reflecting sound cancelling out with the original source. If you boost those freq's you end up with even more cancelling stuff. There's a lot to read about speaker placement and other stuff in here:http://www.genelec.com/learning-center/technology-tutorials/placingloudspeakers/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ski Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 The dips in your frequency spectrum should never be compensated with eq as they occur because of reflecting sound cancelling out with the original source. If you boost those freq's you end up with even more cancelling stuff. As far as I'm aware, dips in the frequency spectrum aren't always caused by cancellation. For example, no speakers have a perfectly flat response, and that's not caused by phase cancellation, is it? In any event, I'm not sure that what you stated is even logical, because if it were true, EQ's wouldn't have any effect anywhere! Not in PA systems, not in control rooms, not on guitars... Discuss! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marcel72 Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 I think you made a good decision. I used to use those Mackies at my old job and I always hated them. If you didn't turn them up until they were clipping, you couldn't hear anything. I'd like to hear Dave's JBLs, I've heard some good stuff about those monitors. I use Dynaudio BM-5As, and I've learned how things 'should' sound in my room, even if it's not the perfect environment. If you know what it should sound like, I believe that you can basically mix on anything that provides a reasonable amount of detail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brinnbacka Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 As far as I'm aware, dips in the frequency spectrum aren't always caused by cancellation. For example, no speakers have a perfectly flat response, and that's not caused by phase cancellation, is it? In any event, I'm not sure that what you stated is even logical, because if it were true, EQ's wouldn't have any effect anywhere! Not in PA systems, not in control rooms, not on guitars... Discuss! Read again... Of course there are a lot of things that have effect on any speakers frequency, phase and power response. Cancellation is one of them, diffraction from the corners is another etc. And naturally the eq's _work_, electrically or mathematically speaking, but in this case they do not remove but enhance the cancellation effect if same freq's are boosted for compensation. Here's another simple graph: http://www.customaudiodesigns.co.uk/articles/frstand.htm Keep discussing! This issue (and acoustics in general) is unfortunately very much overlooked in most studios around the world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fader8 Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 In any event, I'm not sure that what you stated is even logical, because if it were true, EQ's wouldn't have any effect anywhere! Not in PA systems, not in control rooms, not on guitars... but in this case they do not remove but enhance the cancellation effect if same freq's are boosted for compensation. You're both right. There are two attributes of small room acoustics that cause dips and peaks in frequency response, (besides of course, speaker nonlinearities). In the low end, the response is governed by the axial room dimensions. These dimensions will mathematically correspond to the frequencies where nodes and antinodes, (dips and peaks) occur. As we get above 4-500Hz or so, it's a different story. Early reflections represent a delayed signal path. Combine this with the direct sound from the monitor and you get comb filtering. The frequency span between dips/peaks is related to the path difference, and the magnitude of the dips/peaks is related to the strength of the reflection. In either case, eq doesn't solve the problem. However, it can mask the problems. For example, if we have a comb filtering effect from 2.5k up to 16k, it will be perceived as a high end rolloff. That's because comb filtering is linear with frequency but we perceive it in fractional octaves, ie there's more peaks and dips in the upper octaves than in the lower ones. If you eq this with a shelf, the dips get worse, but since the peaks get stronger, you'll percieve that the rolloff has improved. While not the best way to tune a room, if the problems aren't too bad it can be a quasi-acceptable compromise sometimes. That's what these auto-tuning monitor systems "claim" to fix, but it's still much better if you can solve these issues physically, and just let those systems deal with the nonlinearities of the monitors themselves. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ski Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 Fader8, Always good to get your replies, even if I have to go to school to understand what the hell you're talking about. But in all seriousness, thanks for shedding light on this subject. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pantomimeHorse Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 ...... Always good to get your replies, even if I have to go to school to understand what the hell you're talking about. - I get what fader is saying and it reiterates what an engineer (who worked with Oldfield and Tom Newman for many years) told me ages ago: "Never try to solve time-domain problems with frequency-domain solutions." - C Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dkgross Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 "Never try to solve time-domain problems with frequency-domain solutions." but we CAN solve space/time domain problems with Elasic Audio. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fader8 Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 but we CAN solve space/time domain problems with Elasic Audio. Uh-oh. You wrote the . . "E" . . word. Wrong continuum. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marcel72 Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 but we CAN solve space/time domain problems with Elasic Audio. Uh-oh. You wrote the . . "E" . . word. Wrong continuum. I'd like to solve the 'why-hasn't-Leopard-been-fully-qualified-by-Digi-yet' space/time domain problem... Elastic that and I'll be happy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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