It may be due to my lack of training but I can't say I ever noticed them. If you look at my in-room measurement (using a Behringer ECM-8000), you'll see that especially with psychoacoustic smoothing, those peaks don't manifest at the listening position as starkly they do in the Klippel scan.
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Avantone Pro MixCube Monitor Review
- Thread starter amirm
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Absolutely fair and all I want to know is why, in metrical terms, are they using those speakers. Even if I could afford to buy them and even if the Klippel could measure them (can it measure soffit-mounted speakers?), we still need to irrefutably identify the 'translation elements' of these speakers then assign them a score. I'm sure, like me, many of you are sick to the gills of relying on 'well, such and such mastering house has X speaker and they do X records..." aka Toole's 'Circle of Confusion'. Am I understanding that concept correctly? Can we quantify 'translation' or are we forever doomed to find the strongest, most confident Alpha mixer to set the example just because they say so?
Generally speaking, good studio monitors tend to be flat within reason, reasonably full-range, with good dynamic capabilites, and if ported with well-designed ports with a minimum of long ringing (or at least with port tuning low enough that it's inoffensive).
Whether or not that meshes well with the Olive preference score is another story. There is much more emphasis on sound power and early reflections than is necessarily relevant in a heavily treated studio.
Looking at my in-room measurement, the range from 5-8kHz is isolated by a dip at 4.5kHz and a drop off above that. This is the range of vocal sibilants and having it 'segmented' like this is a unique characteristic. The speaker also peaks at 1kHz which is a sensitive point of our hearing according to equal-loudness contours. The 2.7kHz-centered resonance can also serve as a sort of 'icepick' to ensure this range is not too harsh in the mix by forcing compensatory reduction at that range (harshness is a subjectively bad quality in a mix). 2-3kHz is also 'isolated' which is another important vocal bandwidth for clarity and bringing 'forward' into the mix. The response from 80-325Hz is within +-2.5dB so that lines up with the linearity of other monitors.
I'm just making observations on my in room response. Maybe these are useful, maybe not. All I'm trying to do is guess at why these might help someone mix. Thank you for your patience.
I'm just making observations on my in room response. Maybe these are useful, maybe not. All I'm trying to do is guess at why these might help someone mix. Thank you for your patience.
This makes complete sense. And I understand the capitalist logic that pop music has to sell, which means making it attractive to the average person with crap equipment. But it also means that (at least to some degree) sound quality is tailored to the preferences of people who manifestly don't give a damn about sound quality.
Thats not the only reason I want most current popular music to get the hell off my lawn. But it's one of them.
I've wondered the same thing. Perhaps the industry will move to a standard at some point, but I fear even with a standard the final output could still sound "bad" in the hands of an amateur mixer. There's a real artistry to producing and mixing that I do think takes time to develop. I also think what the general public hears is different from what trained ears hear. According to Toole's Sound Reproduction, the general public has mediocre sound analytical ability and is biased towards sound reproduction. I take that as whatever the person prefers, is what they will consider "good" sound. So if we have someone that prefers hip hop, the mix engineer for a hip hop album will have a vastly different target than one for say a shoe gaze album. Perhaps there could be a flat "translation" target, but at the end of the day I think it's still the bias of the engineer and what the target audience has learned to hear.
My comment earlier in the thread was mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I have mixed on these and I can say that switching between these and my main monitors does a couple of things:
1. Removes bias I develop towards the mix. Switching to a mono, crappy speaker highlights issues I may not have heard on my mains because I fell in "love" with the mix. When people say that these are a "magnifying glass", I wonder if it's a result of this effect rather than it being a truer representation.
2. Once I'm able to hear those things, I switch back to my mains to see what the real effect is and EQ from there. I think applying EQ when listening to these is a big mistake.
But is full range really unequivocally advantageous for mixing? For instance, the SCM25A is down 3dB at 60Hz. Surely this is insufficient for modern EDM and yet deadmau5 uses ATC monitors. Yet it's still more than the mixcubes or Auratone 5C. I hypothesize that the bandwidth, in and of itself, or even amplitude response magnitude (flatness, to a degree) is not as important for translation as one might initially assume. Personally, I would think it's sacrosanct but the ATC is +-3dB with a dip at 7kHz - worse than cheaper offerings by Neumann and Genelec yet almost holy in its status as a monitor with unparalleled 'translation' (whatever that means).
Time domain performance seems important to include port vs no port, step response, resonances, etc. I'm just not sure how those tie together in terms of weighting for a score or order of importance.
Yes, I think that early reflections are less of a factor given the nearfield placement not to mention the propensity for people to have reflection free zones established with acoustic absorbers (which I encourage and Toole acknowledges yet doesn't counter). Sound power is probably also less important, as you say, but I don't understand that metric as well as things like 'listening window' or directivity.
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but for this thing, I do give it a pass for "not terrible", just that if it is indeed consistent unit to unit, I bet that awful FR is typical for a lot of consumer full range driver applications like those cheap BT speakers, phone speakers or those pc monitor built in etc..
Good point: as a professional tool, even with a high 'translation score' (which, of course doesn't exist yet), an unskilled craftsperson is still going to produce a non-performant result. Still, it calls up the idea that old-school analog recordists have stated: they made the music sound that good in spite of the limitations like noise and distortion, not because of them. Do mixes made with the NS-10 translate because of or despite their characteristics? Both?
Mixing is unquestionably a skill that one is not born with. Like has been said, we mostly all hear the same thing - a congealed waveform - but the difference is how we can interpret it into isolated musical elements and technical aspects. Richard Moylan makes these distinctions in his book that I'm currently trying to read (it's very wordy).
Genres absolutely have their own technical and aesthetic requirements which comprise what makes a mix 'good'. That being a constant, the monitors and how their characteristics enable or hinder a mix engineer are apparently yet not totally quantified.
Switching monitors to something with a sufficiently unique sonic characteristic, particularly one that showcases the bandwidth from 400-6kHz seems to be a universally-established practice of value. Having identified this, the ATC people seem to say that the SCM25A, for example, is enough of a reference by itself. If you look at the axial response, it doesn't seem special. What else could be going on? Here are some measurements of it though I can't vouch for their accuracy.
Interesting that you don't EQ on the mixcube. I find EQing there preferable to stereo HS50 with sub (wideband, stereo). This doesn't go for 10-15khz or below 80Hz, of course.
RobL
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Newell claims that mastering engineers that he knows often complain that the material coming out of small studios is poorly mixed. He places the blame for this on the poorer time domain response of popular near field monitors that are the music is being mixed on. In his book, he shows the “Acoustic Source Plots” of three different speakers. These plots show low frequency response delay in terms of how many meters behind the speakers low frequencies appear to be emanating. The NS10m and the 700L flush mounted main speakers are very similar, the ported near field monitor shows as much worse. He claims that “smearing” and other problems caused by poor time domain response is being overlooked in the quest to achieve supremely flat amplitude responce and extended low frequency response from small near field monitors.
If I could like this 10x, I would. My observations lead me to agree that amplitude response has been given outsized importance - likely due to it being the most widely understood and hence becoming a marketing 'weapon' - particularly in the bass. A similar mis-prioritization happens with DSP room correction: everyone [EDIT: not everyone, my mistake. 'Many' is more accurate'] is chasing the flattest SPL known to humanity while totally disregarding the time domain. Even then, in the range from 80Hz and below, many are using low-resolution smoothing which is against what Toole says is appropriate for bass frequency analysis. This fish swims up the chain so far as to colonize DSP analyzers which need the user to specifically enable a 'high resolution mode' for the bass range which improves frequency accuracy by compromising the time domain accuracy. In other words, the two are different and apparently not of equal importance and minimum-phase does not account for all of it.
I'm certainly not involved in the music making business, but I think it's a crazy notion that mixes are improved by doing them on some rubbish speaker. I think there's much more logic associated with creating your music on a good measuring speaker - flat anechoic........I would think most speakers would vary randomly around flat anechoic, it might be the best average to use as a target during music creation. I really can't see the logic in creating music on a speaker that has many wild random frequency variations, as you wouldn't want to EQ out those issues into your created music, I think you'd end up making bad decisions re your music balance.
EDIT: to check you mixes on lesser ranged equipment you could just add various Low & High Passes to your flat anechoic speaker to emulate smaller sized speakers that don't have the low end or the high end.
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Tks
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Where's all those folks that handwave me away when I start talking about performance in the professional realm? Every single time I get into the topic they reiterate to me how fidelity doesn't matter beyond I/O, predictability, and customer service availability.
How on Earth can this be a reference anything?
I totally understand your point. It is pure logic: you want flat converters, a neutral room, but f****d up speakers? It sounds preposterous but I'm of the current understanding that it's merely counter-intuitive. It's impossible not to bring up the subjective claims that, "Flat responses are too gentle, I need X speaker because it helps me mix," which you can read a-plenty around the net - specifically in the gearspace thread that I posted assuming it hasn't been totally sanitized of even those statements in addition to mine.
Like you, I use subjective terms like 'good' and 'bad' and, in this case, 'rubbish' but I want to expand to the other hemisphere of my brain and include metrical descriptions like 'series of three comb filtering-like, hi-Q 10dB peak-to-peak deviations from 3-6kHz'. I can't argue against 'rubbish' other than to say your rubbish might be a mixer's best friend. Believe me, I'm as opinionated as you and often want to say highly offensive things and just stick to my guns but that's not why I'm here. I'm here because I want to upgrade from HS50 to something that helps me make tracks which exude the utmost in sonic ecstasy and currently believe that opinions alone are not the best guide.
Similar to the far-field graphs Amir puts up, this speaker is not listened to in a vacuum or purely anechoic space. Its raw Klippel-magic'ed response is not what you get even 1m away. This is just to say that its response in room is not as wild as it looks and I posted my measurement in support of this claim. Again, we have certain suspicions but no actual peer-reviewed theory as to why mixers prefer Objectively 'Flawed' Speaker A vs Objectively 'Better' Speaker B. I think it would be a tremendous boon to the pro audio community to know this information.
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I am sorry, but this crappy monitor translation check was always wrong-headed. Don't care how common it became.
First off, various TV's, cars and table top radios were all bad in hundreds of different ways. Your mix translating on a Horror Tone in no way insured it would work well on other crappy speakers. My mix sounds good on one crappy speaker it will be fine on all the other ways of being crappy it should be obvious is flawed logic. What might have had some validity was checking mono, and on a reduced bandwidth speaker. So a really good speaker with roll offs on each end would do the trick. Many speakers back in the day likely had response rolling off below 200 hz and rolling off above 4000 hz or even dying quickly above that point. This business about transient goodness and all that is just a bunch of hooey. So if you wanted a secondary speaker maybe LS3/5a's and filtering both ends or some such.
Now the modern version, I'd say some coaxial KEF LS50's with a bit of filtering. OTOH, now you probably want it to work on ear buds. There are thousands of different ear buds and 90 % of them are all horrible in their own unique ways. Some have very unbalanced frequency response, but a lack of general bandwidth cannot be counted upon. It is a fools errand to think one reference bad speaker or earbud could be a good stand in for mix checks. It always was a fool's errand.
First off, various TV's, cars and table top radios were all bad in hundreds of different ways. Your mix translating on a Horror Tone in no way insured it would work well on other crappy speakers. My mix sounds good on one crappy speaker it will be fine on all the other ways of being crappy it should be obvious is flawed logic. What might have had some validity was checking mono, and on a reduced bandwidth speaker. So a really good speaker with roll offs on each end would do the trick. Many speakers back in the day likely had response rolling off below 200 hz and rolling off above 4000 hz or even dying quickly above that point. This business about transient goodness and all that is just a bunch of hooey. So if you wanted a secondary speaker maybe LS3/5a's and filtering both ends or some such.
Now the modern version, I'd say some coaxial KEF LS50's with a bit of filtering. OTOH, now you probably want it to work on ear buds. There are thousands of different ear buds and 90 % of them are all horrible in their own unique ways. Some have very unbalanced frequency response, but a lack of general bandwidth cannot be counted upon. It is a fools errand to think one reference bad speaker or earbud could be a good stand in for mix checks. It always was a fool's errand.
MaxwellsEq
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In my experience, Auratones were used very sparingly, just for a few minutes. The mix was done on the main monitors and the nearfield speakers. Then a quick check that it didn't sound broken/weird on the Auratones. Sometimes they weren't used at all
dasdoing
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The World’s Top Selling Album Was Mixed on “Pathetic” Speakers
and it seams Swedien had use for Auratones even in his late years:
and it seams Swedien had use for Auratones even in his late years:
bennybbbx
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@amirm is it possible in klippel to export the impulse response so all can hear how the master equipment for professionals sound with a IR loader ? 
. Because rumors tell that you are only a professional mastering engenier if you hear and check your song on avatone and yamaha NS 10.
I find a better FR of this avatone. maybe somebody is broken on your version or it is too loud for this speaker. dont forget when you measure 1 speaker at 90 db on a real world stereo setup it is 96 db loud then. https://www.skippyweb.eu/2021/11/avantone-pro-mixcubes/
. Because rumors tell that you are only a professional mastering engenier if you hear and check your song on avatone and yamaha NS 10. I find a better FR of this avatone. maybe somebody is broken on your version or it is too loud for this speaker. dont forget when you measure 1 speaker at 90 db on a real world stereo setup it is 96 db loud then. https://www.skippyweb.eu/2021/11/avantone-pro-mixcubes/
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