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

[Robbo99999]

I’m my experience, using Harman or Sonarworks as a starting point, then making small adjustments by ear to match a headphone to an anechoic flat speaker in a good room is a viable approach.

It's not (& can't be) a standard though, we've been talking about standards that recording studios can adopt to avoid Circle of Confusion.

 

[Deleted member 21219]

I don't think anybody said that the NS-10M has a correct response. We all agree with Amir on that.

True, true ..... but the argument seemed to be that the NS-10 (and the CLA-10 clone) was useful BECAUSE of the incorrect response.

Post #22:

"I guess if you like nothing Bob Clearmountain has produced then you comments may be true.. but he insisted on NS10s to check the quality of his productions.. I have been part of many a serious mix where NS10 has been an integral part of the process (but never the exclusive or main monitor). Its slightly unusual "view" of the material could highlight problems and its consistent manufacture made that view portable."

Post #25:

"They are an excellent speaker if you want to hear flaws in a recording, warts and all. But not an enjoyable speaker."

Post #58:

"Correct, so when you use NS10's you focus on the low mid and mid, and you understand the low and highs can't be trusted. They are just one tool in a tool box."

If we have professional people here who can hear 2dB differences at various points in the audio spectrum, then the view that the NS-10 or the CLA-10 is necessary is baseless, and the view that it is even useful is thereby brought into serious doubt.

Monitors with a reasonably flat response, either natively or with the use of DSP, would be all that was necessary ..... and the assurance that any audio data would be accurately transferable would be greatly increased.

Jim

P.S. - And what about cinema sound? There have been some absolutely lousy movie mixes. Has the NS-10 been used in cinema mixes?

 

[Zensō]

It's not (& can't be) a standard though, we've been talking about standards that recording studios can adopt to avoid Circle of Confusion.

Understood. But, you need to take into account that a large majority of the 120K tracks that are being uploaded to streaming services every day are produced in home studios. To make a real difference, these “bedroom producers” must also be taken into consideration. This conversation seems to assume most music is being made in large professional studios, which is not true today.

 

[Deleted member 21219]

Understood. But, you need to take into account that a large majority of the 120K tracks that are being uploaded to streaming services every day are produced in home studios. To make a real difference, these “bedroom producers” must also be taken into consideration. This conversation seems to assume most music is being made in large professional studios, which is not true today.

I was under the impression that the "bedroom producers" still sent their files to professional mixing and mastering services, which is what we are covering. Am I wrong about that?

Jim

 

[PeteL]

True, true ..... but the argument seemed to be that the NS-10 (and the CLA-10 clone) was useful BECAUSE of the incorrect response.

Post #22:

"I guess if you like nothing Bob Clearmountain has produced then you comments may be true.. but he insisted on NS10s to check the quality of his productions.. I have been part of many a serious mix where NS10 has been an integral part of the process (but never the exclusive or main monitor). Its slightly unusual "view" of the material could highlight problems and its consistent manufacture made that view portable."

Post #25:

"They are an excellent speaker if you want to hear flaws in a recording, warts and all. But not an enjoyable speaker."

Post #58:

"Correct, so when you use NS10's you focus on the low mid and mid, and you understand the low and highs can't be trusted. They are just one tool in a tool box."

If we have professional people here who can hear 2dB differences at various points in the audio spectrum, then the view that the NS-10 or the CLA-10 is necessary is baseless, and the view that it is even useful is thereby brought into serious doubt.

Monitors with a reasonably flat response, either natively or with the use of DSP, would be all that was necessary ..... and the assurance that any audio data would be accurately transferable would be greatly increased.

Jim

P.S. - And what about cinema sound? There have been some absolutely lousy movie mixes. Has the NS-10 been used in cinema mixes?

Yes there are different views expressed on this subject. Me my response to that is: I don't know. I let the Mixing engineers themselves decide what tools work for them, I am not qualified to tell them what to use for mixing. What I do know is that they are much less popular today than they once were.

 

[Zensō]

I was under the impression that the "bedroom producers" still sent their files to professional mixing and mastering services, which is what we are covering. Am I wrong about that?

Jim

Mixing is most certainly being done primarily at home. The tools for self-mastering have improved in recent years and an increasing number of producers are also mastering their own work. The results, as you’d expect, vary widely, but with practice it can be done well. I’d say roughly 50% of the independent artists I know send their mixes out for mastering, the rest have moved to self-mastering (sometimes this is determined by the label). It's worth noting that using professional mastering is no guarantee of a better end result, which I’ve learned from personal experience.

 

[dfuller]

Most people out there who use NS10s from what I've found tend to be at youngest in their late 30s. Younger mixers trend toward more linear designs - be that from companies like ATC or PMC (and yes, they are both good enough to be "flat" - at least with the newer designs from PMC) or from Neumann, Genelec, et al.

It is rare of course for anybody to do all their mixing on NS10s, as I've stated before. Mixes done entirely on NS10s tend to have a kind of wonky midrange balance, but used in concert with more linear designs they can be useful.

Me, I hate them. They sound absolutely terrible and don't find them useful.

 

[goat76]

Mixing is most certainly being done primarily at home. The tools for self-mastering have improved in recent years and an increasing number of producers are also mastering their own work. The results, as you’d expect, vary widely, but with practice it can be done well. I’d say roughly 50% of the independent artists I know send their mixes out for mastering, the rest have moved to self-mastering (sometimes this is determined by the label). It's worth noting that using professional mastering is no guarantee of a better end result, which I’ve learned from personal experience.

Can I ask you what the main reasons are why you choose not to master your music by yourself, what is it you expect that the mastering engineer will do to your music?

 

[amirm]

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.

Well, we should hire you as our advocate if that is what you are hearing! You are proving our point that large differences must not exist as it then leaves us not knowing what the truth is.

Me on the other hand would celebrate in streets if the differences between your in-room monitors were that small. You are not remotely where these two monitors are if I surveyed a dozen rooms you mix things in. If you are making mix decisions differently based on these two monitors, then heaven knows major screw ups happen with likes of NS-10 and CLA-10.

 

[Zensō]

Can I ask you what the main reasons are why you choose not to master your music by yourself, what is it you expect that the mastering engineer will do to your music?

For the last few years I’ve mastered all of my own music. There are a number of reasons why artists choose to send their work out to a mastering service. It could be that they don’t have a clear understanding of what is required for the streaming services vs CD duplicator vs vinyl pressing service. It could be that they’re looking for a set of fresh, experienced ears to catch any errors in the mix and add a bit of final polish. It could be that they want to add some prestige to the release by hiring a well known mastering engineer. It could be that their record label (assuming they have one) uses the same mastering engineer for all of their releases. In general, I guess you could call it a quality assurance step.

 

[amirm]

As you are one of those who think that many mixes are badly done, maybe you can give some examples of that as Amir seems to avoid the question.

You are asking the wrong question. No way can I tell you what is or is not a bad "mix." Give me four versions of a mix and then I can opine which one is best -- an exercise that you should be performing with an audience that is not involved in product before releasing something.

What we want is a) consistency and b) knowing what is real and true to what was heard when content was approved. Even if you accomplished both of these, you could still create horrible mixes because you either didn't know what you were doing or it was the artistic intent. It is way beyond the scope of what we are discussing here to determine those facts. As I said above, you need to do your own research with consumers of your content and test your abilities to create mixes that are preferred by consumers.

As an example, I use this track to check for bass and dynamics handling:

I remember playing this on a speaker and hearing distortion. I was going to mark down that speaker but then thought I check it on another. It was then that I heard it distorted as well realizing that distortion is baked into the content. So now I don't use it for that purpose (it is still quite useful track to check for other things). By the same token, the problem we are trying to solve with what you all are creating is not knowing if you created a bad mix because you had a bad monitoring system or you really meant to produce said bad mix. If it is the latter, we won't try to fix our systems to solve it.

I already gave the real example of this way back in the thread. That when I hear a slightly bright track on a speaker, I don't know if that is right or is the fault of the speaker. You can't leave us in limbo like this. Again, I don't have this problem in video.

And what if I gave you an example of a track with bad mix. What then? What would you do? How would you disambiguate what the issues are. Or even on any kind of basis agree or disagree that it is a bad mix? You can just declare it is not a bad mix. Or say it was a bad mix but it was intended that way. Or that the people who created it didn't know what they were doing. You could not show with any evidence any of this being the case or even a combo.

The whole comment begs the question of whether you think there are bad mixes. If there are, then why are you challenging me to give you examples? Now if you don't think there are bad mixes, then let's hear that argument.

 

[PeteL]

You are asking the wrong question. No way can I tell you what is or is not a bad "mix." Give me four versions of a mix and then I can opine which one is best -- an exercise that you should be performing with an audience that is not involved in product before releasing something.

What we want is a) consistency and b) knowing what is real and true to what was heard when content was approved. Even if you accomplished both of these, you could still create horrible mixes because you either didn't know what you were doing or it was the artistic intent. It is way beyond the scope of what we are discussing here to determine those facts. As I said above, you need to do your own research with consumers of your content and test your abilities to create mixes that are preferred by consumers.

As an example, I use this track to check for bass and dynamics handling:

I remember playing this on a speaker and hearing distortion. I was going to mark down that speaker but then thought I check it on another. It was then that I heard it distorted as well realizing that distortion is baked into the content. So now I don't use it for that purpose (it is still quite useful track to check for other things). By the same token, the problem we are trying to solve with what you all are creating is not knowing if you created a bad mix because you had a bad monitoring system or you really meant to produce said bad mix. If it is the latter, we won't try to fix our systems to solve it.

I already gave the real example of this way back in the thread. That when I hear a slightly bright track on a speaker, I don't know if that is right or is the fault of the speaker. You can't leave us in limbo like this. Again, I don't have this problem in video.

And what if I gave you an example of a track with bad mix. What then? What would you do? How would you disambiguate what the issues are. Or even on any kind of basis agree or disagree that it is a bad mix? You can just declare it is not a bad mix. Or say it was a bad mix but it was intended that way. Or that the people who created it didn't know what they were doing. You could not show with any evidence any of this being the case or even a combo.

The whole comment begs the question of whether you think there are bad mixes. If there are, then why are you challenging me to give you examples? Now if you don't think there are bad mixes, then let's hear that argument.

Isn't why you have reference tracks tough? for your subjective evaluations I am fully sure that you have some songs that you know sound balanced and well mixed and mastered on your reference speakers. If this sound too bright on an other speaker, well it's the speaker, quite easy. On the other end, If your known good track sound perfectly fine on a particular speaker, and you listen to an other song and it's too bright, well, this other song is too bright for your taste. Why do you care what he mastered with? He did not do a good job according to your standards of mixing. He could have mixed it wrong on good speakers, or mixed it wrong on wrong speakers, but in the end, it sounds wrong to you. How is it important whether he is simply not good at what he does or he had the wrong tool? In both cases, well he is not good at what he does. He released it like that, you can be the judge of the product. The mastering engineers also have reference tracks. They AB their mixes against known reference all the time. If he did a mix that is annoyingly bright, well he signed up for it. He can't blame what speaker or room he was in, since he accepted the job in these conditions, he chose it. you are allowed as a customer to not like his work.

 

[goat76]

You are asking the wrong question. No way can I tell you what is or is not a bad "mix." Give me four versions of a mix and then I can opine which one is best -- an exercise that you should be performing with an audience that is not involved in product before releasing something.

What we want is a) consistency and b) knowing what is real and true to what was heard when content was approved. Even if you accomplished both of these, you could still create horrible mixes because you either didn't know what you were doing or it was the artistic intent. It is way beyond the scope of what we are discussing here to determine those facts. As I said above, you need to do your own research with consumers of your content and test your abilities to create mixes that are preferred by consumers.

How can you know that my question is wrong when you don't know the reason why I'm asking you that question?

You have earlier in this thread clearly stated that you only find 1 song out of 20 to sound good, which leaves you with 95% of bad-sounding song mixes to choose from, why is that so hard all of a sudden? Just pick one of all those bad mixes and explain in detail what it is you think sounds wrong with it.

If you can't do that, how can you blame the mixing engineer or his choice of monitors if you don't even know if the things you hear are intentional, a clear mixing mistake, or if it was made sounding that bad in mastering?

As an example, I use this track to check for bass and dynamics handling:

I remember playing this on a speaker and hearing distortion. I was going to mark down that speaker but then thought I check it on another. It was then that I heard it distorted as well realizing that distortion is baked into the content. So now I don't use it for that purpose (it is still quite useful track to check for other things). By the same token, the problem we are trying to solve with what you all are creating is not knowing if you created a bad mix because you had a bad monitoring system or you really meant to produce said bad mix. If it is the latter, we won't try to fix our systems to solve it.

In a way, you kind of explained why checking translation on another speaker is a good idea. The only difference was that your test subject was a speaker and not an audio track.

I already gave the real example of this way back in the thread. That when I hear a slightly bright track on a speaker, I don't know if that is right or is the fault of the speaker. You can't leave us in limbo like this. Again, I don't have this problem in video.

You can use a well-known tack to evaluate a loudspeaker, or you can use a well-known loudspeaker to evaluate an audio track.

And what if I gave you an example of a track with bad mix. What then? What would you do? How would you disambiguate what the issues are. Or even on any kind of basis agree or disagree that it is a bad mix? You can just declare it is not a bad mix. Or say it was a bad mix but it was intended that way. Or that the people who created it didn't know what they were doing. You could not show with any evidence any of this being the case or even a combo.

The whole comment begs the question of whether you think there are bad mixes. If there are, then why are you challenging me to give you examples? Now if you don't think there are bad mixes, then let's hear that argument.

The reason I ask you this question is that I don't think you have enough insight into what may have been done in the mixing stage, and what may have been done in the mastering stage of an audio production. But for the people in this thread with some experience in mixing music, they can often hear at what stage of the audio production something was done.

So the only thing you need to do is pick some examples of tracks you think are badly mixed, and the people with mixing experience can most likely, with pretty good accuracy, tell you if that was done in either the mixing or the mastering stage of the audio production.

The best mixing and mastering engineers can probably even tell you what microphone types were used, what compressor was used, and so on. It's possible that they can explain to you how that sound you find sounding bad was done if it was intentional, or if it is an artifact of aggressive mastering or something else.

 

[Geert]

You have earlier in this thread clearly stated that you only find 1 song out of 20 to sound good,

The goal post indeed moved from why does only a minority of recordings sound great to we want to hear what the artist intended. Maybe the latter objective is what was meant from the start, but I really wonder if people are going to be happy with that. If you want the whole industry to do an investment, then better assure the requirements are clear. Don't come complaining again afterwards.

 

[amirm]

How can you know that my question is wrong when you don't know the reason why I'm asking you that question?

Huh? I explained why.

You have earlier in this thread clearly stated that you only find 1 song out of 20 to sound good, which leaves you with 95% of bad-sounding song mixes to choose from, why is that so hard all of a sudden?

I explained this as well at the time.

You can use a well-known tack to evaluate a loudspeaker, or you can use a well-known loudspeaker to evaluate an audio track.

A "well-known" track? What the heck is that? And how would I know how it was intended to sound and relative to another track?

The reason I ask you this question is that I don't think you have enough insight into what may have been done in the mixing stage, and what may have been done in the mastering stage of an audio production.

There you go proving why it was the wrong question to ask. I need zero insight into what you all do to produce your track. That is your business. My business is consuming said track and I am asking you to enable me to create a system that produces said music by the same criteria that got you to approve it. You seem to care so little about how your music "translates" to our systems that you don't even want to assure we hear anything close to your monitoring system. This would horrify anyone in pro video world. They absolutely want to make sure that what they see, is what we see. And if we don't, it is offensive to them. Seriously offensive.

In absence of you caring or taking any steps to solve these problems, we get to analyze the bits you use such as this speaker and likes of NS-10. You are left defenseless other than tired argument of, "well you don't know how we mix things." Well then explain it in detail how you don't produce a screwed up mix using such speakers. Show me a study of your group of producers given a proper monitor and these broken consumer speakers. Show that when it was all said and done, the mix using broken speakers was the right one and garnered higher preference among listeners.

Heck, even the suppliers of the technology to you know that you are not critical in this regard as to have produced this CLA-10, told you in just words that it is the same as NS-10M and folks start to scoop them up and sing their praises just as well as that speaker! None of you demanded to see anechoic measurements and comparisons, did you? Did you ask them to show you the waterfall using the same parameters? You said that was important so why did it take me, a consumer advocate, to do what you should have done?

Answer is that you run with unproven folklore the same as consumers do. You have no need for formal studies to find what is really going on. Meanwhile you scuff at what we know when we are doing these experiments over and over again.

Heck, the situation is so bad that we, the consumer researchers, have to jump in to help and innovate. See these two papers to try to help establish a proper standard for Cinema sound:

Subjective Listening Tests for Preferred Room Response in Cinemas - Part 1: System and Test Descriptions
Linda A. Gedemer
School of Computing, Science & Engineering, University of Salford, Manchester, UK
[email protected]
Harman International, Northridge, CA USA
[email protected]

Subjective Listening Tests for Preferred Room Response in Cinemas - Part 2: Preference Test Results
Linda A. Gedemer
School of Computing, Science & Engineering, University of Salford, Manchester, UK
[email protected]
Harman International, Northridge, CA USA

I bet you have not even heard of these papers let alone know what is in techniques for researching what is a proper target curve for both monitoring and theaters.

To be sure, I admire the work you do to create music. We wouldn't have anything to enjoy if it were not for your collective effort. But you could do better, so much better, if you just let a bit of what we are breathing go down in your lungs. You need to study these things. You need to strive to improve things. If you don't want to fine, but stop making these lay arguments over and over again. You are not informing anyone of anything.

 

[amirm]

The goal post indeed moved from why does only a minority of recordings sound great to we want to hear what the artist intended. Maybe the latter objective is what was meant from the start, but I really wonder if people are going to be happy with that. If you want the whole industry to do an investment, then better assure the requirements are clear. Don't come complaining again afterwards.

Once again, I explained that. My response that majority of tracks are not audiophile quality was in response to poster saying only 1% had issues. I also said many of those tracks land in "fine" category. It is true that in a perfect universe, every piece of music you produce will give us a sense of reality and fidelity that would cause our jaw to drop. But you are not there and will never be. This doesn't mean we don't address broad problems that exist where we can't even hear what you heard. That would be the first step in knowing where the problem is. The solution to this problem is standardization.

The solution to realism is going to be far more complex but first steps in that are known: start performing controlled test and find out what listeners prefer. Test us and non audiophiles and find out if there are commonalities. Harman did this and found that preferences are actually the same. Above research I just post about cinema sound mostly pointed to the same thing (what was left had to do with lack of standardization of program material).

To be sure, I am not naïve to assume that the talent also wants to produce audiophile recordings. And their wishes ultimately trump ours. We do have the power of our wallet though and will chase the combination when we can find it. And when we can, if the art is great, we will still listen, at least I do, damn the fidelity.

So please, no more stunts and high school debating tactics like this. Be part of the solution and not the problem. Agree that standards are badly needed if for nothing else, than the music translating between *your* rooms.

 

[Cbdb2]

Oh, they absolutely "think about the room." Problem is they farm out the work to an acoustician that is following old school strategies that are simply not backed by modern science. Look at the work that Keith Yates did for us in those CFD simulations and compare it to credentials and tools that Pro acousticians deploy. It is night and day.

Ultimately though, if they had done a great job here, we wouldn't have the problem we have. Or see reports like that Genelec with all the variabilities. And they would proudly talk about the response of their rooms.

Instead what permeates is "I know what I am doing, how dare you question me. Here are all the albums I have produced." I know because that is how the last discussion went that I had on GS forum. In a discussion of lossy audio for example, the engineer had zero knowledge of the technology and just made up stuff about what AAC compression did (and in an interview no less). No amount of explaining the reality of that coming from someone who spent a decade managing development of the same (me), would register with him. Somehow they think ability to produce music gives them true knowledge of audio science and engineering by osmoses.

And oh, this notion of "how it translates" was constantly used to justify using whatever monitors they had with claims that using Genelecs won't do it.

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:
View attachment 305637

So please excuse me if I don't much weight about industry claims of knowing what they are doing.

This is starting to feel like a personal vendetta against engineers. And now acousticians. Im very sorry one person got so angry but when you slam an entire industry from the outside what do you expect. There are as many engineers that know as much or more about audio than you. There the ones you dont notice cause they agree with most of what you say and don't post.
Are there any good mixes from the seventies? How if everyone was mixing in a non measured room?

 

[PeteL]

Agree that standards are badly needed if for nothing else, than the music translating between *your* rooms.

If maybe at the very least you would tell us, clearly for once, what you want standardized, maybe some of us could agree? As mentioned earlier, there are already standards, actual standards, and there are also what are standard "practices". You mentioned all sort of things, from frequency balance of music, you seem to step back now, to a certification system where many different mixes would be certified for different class of devices, to "show measurment of your room". OK, which measurements you want? At Nearfield position in the sweet spot? Further back in the room? All of them? and after you have all that, from there, what's next is you will try to recreate in your listening room? And then you'll also have a certified listening room? What do you want exactly Amir?

 

[lowkeyoperations]

.

So please, no more stunts and high school debating tactics like this. Be part of the solution and not the problem. Agree that standards are badly needed if for nothing else, than the music translating between *your* rooms.

please Amir. Name the standards you believe need to be implemented.

 

[Doodski]

Dynamic range and the over use of compression is a good start. Is that compression where they boost the low signal level stuff and it becomes a clipping fest? Create standards for the recording dynamic range. Of course frequency response standards too.