Avantone CLA-10 (Yamaha NS-10M Clone) Review

[lowkeyoperations]

What would the +/- be? Would it be down to 20Hz. Probably 20-20kHz +/- a little bit. It gets really hard to fill in some room modes.

Headphones would be pretty easy though as they don’t require room issue treatment. Only ear canal resonance treatment.

So would a studio comply with the standard if they were headphone based with the right headphones? That sounds pretty easily achievable.

I’m guessing that the consumer then needs to have their system comply with the standard. They couldn’t listen on a pair of speakers with no room correction and have variations between a peaks and nulls of 20dB and benefit.

Or else they could have the right headphones.

 

[Deleted member 21219]

There seems to be a misunderstanding here.

Some people seem to think that this is an issue of some "outsider" forcing their will through draconian measures onto the industry. That's not true. The industry has been evolving over many years, has gone through many changes over many years, has improved gradually over many years .... and now it's time to take the next step.

There has never been a step in that evolution that did not have the input of members of the recording industry. As we have seen, there were some who had negative views. They were the minority. And there was a time of adjustment (remember early digital?), but that's to be expected in any transition.

All in all, the recording industry has successfully transitioned through 90 years of progressively better and better equipment, techniques ... and yes, standards. Many of the standards came about because they produced a product more easily and more effectively produced, and more consistently favored by consumers. (a favored product means more $$$)

I have some files of recordings of Robert Johnson and Enrico Caruso from the '20s and '30s. As fascinating as they are, I doubt that anyone wants their end product to sound like that today.

Jim

 

[375HP2482]

What would the +/- be? Would it be down to 20Hz. Probably 20-20kHz +/- a little bit. It gets really hard to fill in some room modes.

Headphones would be pretty easy though as they don’t require room issue treatment. Only ear canal resonance treatment.

So would a studio comply with the standard if they were headphone based with the right headphones? That sounds pretty easily achievable.

I’m guessing that the consumer then needs to have their system comply with the standard. They couldn’t listen on a pair of speakers with no room correction and have variations between a peaks and nulls of 20dB and benefit.

Or else they could have the right headphones.

Although headphones can be useful for balancing levels accurately, being anechoic they can give a misleading rendering of reverberant effects. Utilizing a pleasing amount of reverb in a headphone mix will often result in an excessively wet mix as heard over loudspeakers.

 

[lowkeyoperations]

Although headphones can be useful for balancing levels accurately, being anechoic they can give a misleading rendering of reverberant effects. Utilizing a pleasing amount of reverb in a headphone mix will often result in an excessively wet mix as heard over loudspeakers.

Yes, I know translation from headphones to speakers is tricky.

But if the mix was made on ‘standard’ headphones and the song then listened to on ‘standard’ headphones, the theory is that the result would be improved.

I think that needs testing. At the moment it’s a concept. And it would only be headphone to headphone ‘certified’ in this case. I don’t think you could do headphone to speaker successfully unless it’s something like VSX.

I think that the Slate VSX headphones are a good example that might be a way forwards.
Anyone listening to those hears the same thing. And they emulate rooms with crosstalk and measurements of monitors in their actual rooms. You can mix reverb on these way better than normal headphones.

I can listen to mixes done in Mike Deans room on my headphones emulating Mike Deans room.

I can also listen to Masters done by Howie Weinberg on my headphones emulating his mastering suite.

That’s the concept isn’t it? That I can hear the same thing they did when they mixed and mastered?

 

[contium]

I don't think I have ever heard a recording/mixing/mastering engineer say they used NS10's for their accuracy, Most actually say they sound like crap. But they have to produce music that sounds good on everything and that's where the NS10's come in. Bluetooth speakers, car systems etc. They have to make sure it translates.

 

[JSmith]

To top it off, one of them registered on a throw-away mail service and sent me a death threat in email claiming because I talked about Genelec, he is going to come over and go after my wife and I in gory detail. He said some things that made it easy to identify who he was on GS forum which turned out to be a very senior member and in that argument with me. Here is a bit of what he wrote:

Oh mate... this is insane. Not only personal offence and threatening conduct, but attempted racism to boot (the idiot couldn't even get that right). I assume you mean the comments part of the Goldensound site? Simply horrendous... you should not have to deal with crap like that. Whoever did this (it is assumed the offender is reading this thread), for shame you complete tool.


JSmith

 

[amirm]

Oh mate... this is insane. Not only personal offence and threatening conduct, but attempted racism to boot (the idiot couldn't even get that right). I assume you mean the comments part of the Goldensound site? Simply horrendous... you should not have to deal with crap like that. Whoever did this (it is assumed the offender is reading this thread), for shame you complete tool.


JSmith

Thanks for the sentiments. No GS stands for greaspace or gearslutz as it used to be called. It is the most popular and oldest forum for audio professionals.

 

[pierre]

There are lot of emotional responses here, and I suspect that we're trying to much at one time, and clogging the drain, so to speak. Let's try taking one statement at a time, and see how that works.

In post #503, @amirm quoted Dr. Floyd Toole as saying .....

"Recording engineers who work in these circumstances, presumably approving
of them, are doing the art no favor. This is an excellent example of the circle of
confusion in action because members of this group of audio professionals cannot
even exchange their own recordings with a reasonable certainty of how they will
sound in one another’s control rooms."

Is the part in bold true? Can one studio send a recording to another studio and not have a reasonable certainty of what the people in the other studio will hear?

Please answer with civility. Thank you.

Jim

I think it depends.
- If you have 5 rooms in a studio all with Genelec and done reasonably well, then the sound from a room is very similar to another room.
- For movies post prod, if your room is Dolby compliant, then "reasonable certainty" is achievable.
- For older mix studios, Floyd is likely correct.
- For mastering studios, tolerance is much lower and they are usually more similar than not.

Recent speakers (think JBL Series 7, Genelec, Neumann, etc) sounds more similar than not. People overstates the differences. Rooms have a lot more impacts and there is no standard, no fixed size or ratio, no real constraints on how much reverb. Mixing is usually done near field since that minimise the influence of the room. Mastering engineers are usually paranoiac with their room: they will have very flat freq response full range, the reverb time is less well specified. But some use wide dispersion speakers, some use lower dispersion and of course they do not sound exactly the same. I am in favor of reducing the divergence between the mix/mastering/control rooms and would love to have an open standard. It doesn't mean that it will improve the quality of mixing and mastering. It only means that the probability that it sounds "good" or "the same" on a large number of systems increases.

etc

 

[amirm]

I don't think I have ever heard a recording/mixing/mastering engineer say they used NS10's for their accuracy, Most actually say they sound like crap. But they have to produce music that sounds good on everything and that's where the NS10's come in. Bluetooth speakers, car systems etc. They have to make sure it translates.

That is the argument we have been addressing. We see no logic in using a speaker with wrong frequency response for mix decisions. Whatever problems you specifically find there is unlikely to be reproducible in other speakers the same way. The speakers you list are all broken in different ways than NS10. Here is Bob Katz, one of the most famous mastering engineers out there as quoted by Dr. Toole in his book:

 

[lowkeyoperations]

But is compiling vocal takes on NS-10s evident in the same way? That is not in any way adjusting frequency. It’s a separate task.

Whether someone uses NS10s for vocal comping is irrelevant to this new standard. It’s not touch frequency.

But a pair of NS10s and a pair of subwoofers, with appropriate room correction and dsp eq would likely comply with the standard for frequency response wouldnt they?

 

[Mnyb]

EQ can not fix directivity errors as eq applies to both direct and reflected sound ? Speaker s with direktivity errors dont take well to eq above the bass range . Results gets unpredictable due to the room so the direct sound migth then be wrong instead?

 

[pierre]

But a pair of NS10s and a pair of subwoofers, with appropriate room correction and dsp eq would likely comply with the standard for frequency response wouldnt they?

Very likely.

 

[pierre]

EQ can not fix directivity errors as eq applies to both direct and reflected sound ? Speaker s with direktivity errors dont take well to eq above the bass range . Results gets unpredictable due to the room so the direct sound migth then be wrong instead?

True. But there is not that many speakers with a good directivity and that may be a bit restrictive. Esp. near field you don't care too much about directivity. If you move a lot around a console then yes, it helps a lot.

In practice a coax or a 3 ways is helping, see the ones from Genelec, KEF coax, high end Revel etc

 

[lowkeyoperations]

EQ can not fix directivity errors as eq applies to both direct and reflected sound ? Speaker s with direktivity errors dont take well to eq above the bass range . Results gets unpredictable due to the room so the direct sound migth then be wrong instead?

In nearfield and treated room is that such a problem?

 

[goat76]

Yesterday, I stumbled over a comparison video of two flat-measuring monitors, the Neumann KH80 DSP vs the Genelec 8020D. I know that we should never judge how a speaker sounds over an in-room recording like that, but as long as the microphones are not moved as is the case with the recording, we can at least hear that the two speakers don't render the sound in the same even if both of them are considered to be very neutral reference studio monitors.

This is the measurements of the speakers by the person making the video:

Even if both of these two studio monitors measure almost the same with fairly small visual deviations, I find them to sound very different from each other. In the measurements, we can see that the Neumann speaker has just a little more energy in the range of 250Hz to 1kHz and just a little less energy in the range of 6kHz to 10kHz, and those small differences are enough to make the representation distinctly fatter-sounding in the low-mid frequency area and less "sparkly"-sounding in the top-end.

If a mixing engineer was handed the task to mix a track exclusively on both of these two flat-sounding reference monitors with the same sounding end result as the goal, and without the chance to check the mixes on other speakers for translation or that any comparisons were done to reference tracks during the mix, I would say that the outcome of the two mixes would sound fairly different from each other.

But if these two monitors were just used for certain mixing tasks as the NS-10 was mostly used, and the mix was checked on other monitors during the production, as full-range speakers during the mixing stage and another set of full-range and flat-measuring speakers at the mastering stage, then it is a good chance that the resulting product (the track) that we as the consumers hear, will sound pretty much the same no matter if the Neumann KH80 DSP or the Genelec 8020D was used at some stage of the production.

Here is the comparison video:

Neumann KH80 DSP vs Genelec 8020D || Sound & Frequency Response Comparison

 

[Blumlein 88]

True. But there is not that many speakers with a good directivity and that may be a bit restrictive. Esp. near field you don't care too much about directivity. If you move a lot around a console then yes, it helps a lot.

In practice a coax or a 3 ways is helping, see the ones from Genelec, KEF coax, high end Revel etc

An LSR 305 is not bad at all. It only gets better if you can spend more on better well designed speakers. While no Genelec or coax KEF, those little speakers are closer cousins than many, many speakers. $300 for a pair. Amps built in. The speakers reviewed at the start of this thread are a total joke, travesty and rip off in comparison. More than twice the money and about 1/4th the sound quality (or less). An excellent example of benefits of breaking the Circle of Confusion and designing with the right target goals.

 

[lowkeyoperations]

^re-read his post. What you interpreted it as is not what he said.

 

[goat76]

Your post is illogical. Two good speakers with some small audible differences are a problem, but throwing in an erractic broken speaker will FIX the results????
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!! Very funny. This belongs in the humor thread.

If you read my post more carefully it should be clear that the difference doesn't matter when the mix is checked on a number of other monitors during the production. Stop acting like a fool.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Yesterday, I stumbled over a comparison video of two flat-measuring monitors, the Neumann KH80 DSP vs the Genelec 8020D. I know that we should never judge how a speaker sounds over an in-room recording like that, but as long as the microphones are not moved as is the case with the recording, we can at least hear that the two speakers don't render the sound in the same even if both of them are considered to be very neutral reference studio monitors.

This is the measurements of the speakers by the person making the video:

View attachment 305689


Even if both of these two studio monitors measure almost the same with fairly small visual deviations, I find them to sound very different from each other. In the measurements, we can see that the Neumann speaker has just a little more energy in the range of 250Hz to 1kHz and just a little less energy in the range of 6kHz to 10kHz, and those small differences are enough to make the representation distinctly fatter-sounding in the low-mid frequency area and less "sparkly"-sounding in the top-end.

If a mixing engineer was handed the task to mix a track exclusively on both of these two flat-sounding reference monitors with the same sounding end result as the goal, and without the chance to check the mixes on other speakers for translation or that any comparisons were done to reference tracks during the mix, I would say that the outcome of the two mixes would sound fairly different from each other.

But if these two monitors were just used for certain mixing tasks as the NS-10 was mostly used, and the mix was checked on other monitors during the production, as full-range speakers during the mixing stage and another set of full-range and flat-measuring speakers at the mastering stage, then it is a good chance that the resulting product (the track) that we as the consumers hear, will sound pretty much the same no matter if the Neumann KH80 DSP or the Genelec 8020D was used at some stage of the production.

Here is the comparison video:

Neumann KH80 DSP vs Genelec 8020D || Sound & Frequency Response Comparison

Didn't sound hugely different to me. Also didn't sound quite level matched. Close, but not the same audibly. I noticed they matched level with an SPL meter. Sorry, this is almost surely not good enough. It can be done, but the way most do it is not correct. Also the microphones are pretty good, but cardioids. The low end is going to be rolled off versus the reference track. So not representative of what you would hear in person on the low end.

 

[Blumlein 88]

If you read my post more carefully it should be clear that the difference doesn't matter when the mix is checked on a number of other monitors during the production. Stop acting like a fool.

But it is illogical. It does matter on what it is checked. Checking on multiple monitors is not a panacea of fixing issues. You guys need to let go of this particular crack pipe.

But I did respond hastily which why I deleted that post within a minute.