Should You Forget Monitor Speakers & Just Use Hi-Fi Speakers?

[lfm]

Except it doesn't work that way because it takes only a very short time to learn how a particular set of speakers sounds. If you aren't regularly rendering out works-in-progress and listening to them on all manner of different set-ups, you're not going to get good results, no matter what you are using for monitoring. It's an essential part of the process, to confirm that what you are doing is working. I reckon I'd render out at least half-a-dozen album WiPs during the process of finishing one, over a period of a couple of months.

The process you talk about can be done once.
- do these monitors translate well
- don't go by rumours or reviews, your mixing room is your room

If yes, you can limit the rest of listening devices.
- your in ear on phone and car maybe

But if as you mentioned, you changed monitor devices often, you have to do that once for each new pair you use.
- listen on just about any device you can get hold of

If you're not doing it, if you are putting all your faith into your monitors, you're an idiot.

There is always a risk if you use too good monitors
- you can press these elements real hard tweaking with eq and modulation effects

There was an album of an artist that I felt was distorting quite a bit in upper mids on my hifi tweeters, but not on my mixing monitors which has real hi end elements.

So not all faith on monitors, but good enough investment at least to minimize extra listening devices.
- and important to have enough options to adjust to your room

The reference music track I put together was a minute or so from a range of productions that are particularly good sounding in various aspects
- powerful drums, as an Gossip and a Phil Collins album
- bass and synth bass, as Leon Russel
- clean and airy, Mariah Carrey, Mark Knopfler
- acoustic instruments, Leo Kottke on guitar, brass, some grand piano stuff
- some classical piece with choirs and stuff and very dynamic
- and some good old Led Zeppelin not so highly produced music as pop

[BONES]

Why would you want to minimise the number of listening devices? I listen to music in the car all the time, why would it not be the first place I'd want to listen to my own music? I also listen to music on headphones on my way to work most days so, again, why would I not want to listen to my own music in that environment? The only difference is that I listen to it with more of a critical ear but it isn't something I do specifically for the purpose of finding issues, I do it because I want to listen to the music in the car and on the way to work.

[kritikon]

Seems to be a popular assumption that hifi speakers are shit compared to monitors, as they're all bass-weighted etc. I beg to differ a lot. That depends on if you're using shit hifi speakers, and I haven't for decades. My hifi speakers are generally quite a bit better than the average studio monitor and I would be perfectly happy using them for my studio. I reference studio stuff on them always. The reason I don't use them in the studio is because A) - they cost a fkn fortune and I can, but don't want to have 2 multi-thousand$ sets of speakers (that money is better spent on keyboards for me ), and B) I mostly use near-fields for errrr...near-field monitoring, where I'm not making my ears bleed. If I have the studio up loud, I'll have the missus banging on the floor with a broomstick. and anyway, mixing loud all the time is counter productive IMO.

My near-fields aren't half bad but my hifi ones wipe the floor with them. Do you guys all use shit cheapo ones or summat? I just assume musos would automatically buy decent speakers...

[zerocrossing]

Whenever I mix something where I don’t know the playback system, I bounce between my monitors, my hi-fi AV system (Boston Acoustics), AirPod Pros and a Bose Bluetooth speaker.

[Cavey Arrgh]

My go to is to put it on a USB and play it on different things. I can play it through my TV but the best check is the car. If it sounds good in the car, then it's done.

Same here. My nearly-final mixes usually sound fine on everything except my car stereo (bog standard American low/midrange car). This is even setting all low/mid/high "eq" settings right in the middle. If I can get it to sound good there, it rarely sounds bad when I recheck on the monitors, corrected headphones, earbuds, etc.

It drives ( ) me crazy how different all the common listening devices sound, and the fact that people listen to music on absolute garbage (laptops, phone, Beats headphones...).

[osiris]

To me it's like watching Picard on an iPhone. Why?

[eLawnMust]

Good God No... Don't use any of that wireless garbage especially air pods that beam radiation right through your skull... Have watched a number of videos in the past several years showing with gauge these things emit over safe limit just pulling them outta the case...

Great way to turn oneself into a chowderhead permanently>>>

Don't take my word for it look it up & always wonder why on ipads the antenna is on the bottom near the crotch>>>

[jlgrimes11]

Near field Monitors have a purpose and it is more than just having a fairly neutral freq response.


1. Fairly rugged build allows for loud signal bursts and feedback loops which can be common in audio production. Would you want to put your hi fi system up to the same abuse as Studio Monitors?

2. Near fields are optimized for close range sweet spots, which is even more important if you are in a bad room. Alot of hi fi systems are designed for more far away range listening. So if your room isn't treated well, Near fields can be even more important.

3. I often find I can transcribe songs better on well placed Near fields than other speakers. Sometimes if trying to learn a song in rehearsal can be difficult if not hearing things correctly. Even if I try on my hifi TV system I have a harder time. On Near fields in a good room I can find bass notes much easier. I find more normal setups either have a muddy bass response (that sometimes sounds great for listening) or limited bass presence. I'm not sure if that is just the neutrality of the speakers alone or being in the sweet spot. As I think the nature of Monitors is to be able to easily identify problems which might be masked by other systems. That said certain problems in high midrange sometimes can pop out better on crappier "limited" systems (where you arent hearing extreme lows or highs) so i think in certain cases a crappy Monitoring system can sometimes tell you more than a hifi system.


That said use what you like as long as you understand the limitations.

But I would pick decent Near fields combined with a crappy pair of bargain PC speakers any day for mixing over a hifi, but a hifi system can be a good alternate Monitor set too especially if you "know" the speakers.

[jancivil]

One should hear a mix on several disparate sound systems, anyway.

Flat-ish speakers get dissed as sounding crap, but the idea is most basic reference. Home systems are designed to flatter the sound of whatever. You want to hear both and find a middle solution,

[jens]

I'm with Bones on this one.

[justin3am]

I agree that it's a good idea to check mixes on multiple playback systems but like others, I don't have time to go out to my car every time I bounce a new draft. So I have ways to mimic those less than ideal listening environments, in the studio.

It's interesting to hear people still saying "if it sounds good in my car, it'll sound good everywhere". That was something I heard a lot in the early '00s but I've always found it easiest to make a mix translate well to car stereo. I've always felt like a car is almost an ideal space for playback, as there are no parallel walls, there isn't enough room for long standing waves to build up and aside from the windows, most surfaces don't reflect sound well. But then you are always listening from a position which is offset from the center of the stereo field and the speakers/amps may not be ideal (usually tuned way too bass heavy, IMO), so very wide/dynamic mixes can sound weird. All IME, of course!

For me I feel more confident once I have a mix sounding decent on a boombox, clock radio or bluetooth speaker in a tiled room, like a kitchen. Laptop speakers also frequently help me pinpoint problems in the mid range.

[thecontrolcentre]

I'm with Bones on this one.

me too

I also agree with what Justin posted.

I'm currently considering picking up a pair of Genelec 8010A's as a second reference system.

[Cavey Arrgh]

It's interesting to hear people still saying "if it sounds good in my car, it'll sound good everywhere". That was something I heard a lot in the early '00s but I've always found it easiest to make a mix translate well to car stereo. I've always felt like a car is almost an ideal space for playback, as there are no parallel walls, there isn't enough room for long standing waves to build up and aside from the windows, most surfaces don't reflect sound well. But then you are always listening from a position which is offset from the center of the stereo field and the speakers/amps may not be ideal (usually tuned way too bass heavy, IMO), so very wide/dynamic mixes can sound weird. All IME, of course!

For me I feel more confident once I have a mix sounding decent on a boombox, clock radio or bluetooth speaker in a tiled room, like a kitchen. Laptop speakers also frequently help me pinpoint problems in the mid range.

I agree the car thing it's slightly counterintuitive, but somehow my car highlights things that sound fine on any other "reasonable" playback device.

I was (not really) joking with my friend who has also been producing since "the 1900s" that anyone who listens on a laptop, phone speaker, or in your example, a clock radio doesn't deserve a good listening experience. More to the point, they can't really be expecting one, and won't get one, even if [insert your favorite mix engineer here] mixed it themself. Those devices simply sound very bad, no matter what. (I mean relative to even a $50 pair of cans, or lowish end real speakers)

A quasi-related analogy: Eddie Van Halen can make a low-end Walmart guitar with rusty strings sound pretty good, but if you give him a plastic Fisher-price toy guitar, he'll sound bad, relative to the cheapo real guitar. (Still better than me playing an American Strat though)

Of course, all the above is caveated if your goal is to get as many ears on your music as possible.n Unfortunately, many people listen on terrible playback devices. Fortunately for me, my music is a labor of love (doesn't need to earn me a penny), meant for friends, and the small % of people who listen to music for textures & details.

[ghettosynth]

I agree that it's a good idea to check mixes on multiple playback systems but like others, I don't have time to go out to my car every time I bounce a new draft. So I have ways to mimic those less than ideal listening environments, in the studio.

It's interesting to hear people still saying "if it sounds good in my car, it'll sound good everywhere". That was something I heard a lot in the early '00s but I've always found it easiest to make a mix translate well to car stereo. I've always felt like a car is almost an ideal space for playback, as there are no parallel walls, there isn't enough room for long standing waves to build up and aside from the windows, most surfaces don't reflect sound well. But then you are always listening from a position which is offset from the center of the stereo field and the speakers/amps may not be ideal (usually tuned way too bass heavy, IMO), so very wide/dynamic mixes can sound weird. All IME, of course!

For me I feel more confident once I have a mix sounding decent on a boombox, clock radio or bluetooth speaker in a tiled room, like a kitchen. Laptop speakers also frequently help me pinpoint problems in the mid range.

But if you have bass problems, the things that you can't really just correct with software, it often shows up in a car. Yes, car systems are bass heavy, and for people that make bass heavy music, that system will reveal the too much or too little bass that you didn't hear in your studio.

Also, I think that you might be over-interpreting a casual statement. In the 90s, 00s, it was one of the systems that we could listen on and one of the few systems that had sufficient bass to hear bass. So it was a cross check. For me, it was the first cross check. If it didn't sound good in the car then it needed more work, full stop. That said, I was guilty of discussing whether or not it passed the car check.

[BackInCheck]

I use the same set of hifi-speakers from a South German company for monitoring my mixes, as well as for listening to music in general. They have a very neutral frequency response that I haven't found in any active monitor speakers below a certain price point. Great bang for the buck, since they were quite affordable. Afaik the transient response of passive hifi-speakers is not as impactful as that of active monitors, but it hasn't been a problem for me. If you are into heavy distortion and bass I guess active studio monitors might be the better option, since they are better at dealing with loudness and pressure. For my acoustic and sample-based music they are perfectly fine though.