Avantone Pro MixCube Monitor Review

[dasdoing]

I think Fast Car is all about the (heavilly compressed) guitar that will reveal any resonances in the midrange that fall on those notes

 

[tomtoo]

I think you mean speaker. in headphones are used mostly widebands. 1 system 1 problem 2 systems 2 problems. maybe you try multisystem headphones if you hear a diffrence in clarity and soundstage . for use in nearfield on a desktop or on a mixer bridge in low distance a single speaker have really advantages in theory too. more direct sound less room sound. because of the beaming there happen less reflections on desktop or Mixer Meter Bridge. that the avantone have this limit frequency range in bass is not so worse when use subwoofer below 70 hz. because on desktop the upper bass 80-120 hz is boost and boom alot. reduce this bass with EQ give large phase shifts and transient problems. you can also avoid a HP filter before the avantone when use a sub. this avoid this much phase shift of the HP filter

there should really a new avantone with a more linear FR and upto 20 khz

See you have a special problem, nobody would recomend putting your speakers on a table. And sitting 80cm away to get some pleasure. At least not me. btw, why you not test a phase linear eq plugin?

 

[bennybbbx]

See you have a special problem, nobody would recomend putting your speakers on a table. And sitting 80cm away to get some pleasure. At least not me.

thats no special problem. when make music you mostly need a desktop. https://www.ipr.edu/blogs/audio-production/what-is-in-a-music-studio/

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[tomtoo]

thats no special problem. when make music you mostly need a desktop. https://www.ipr.edu/blogs/audio-production/what-is-in-a-music-studio/

Milwaukee Recording Studio | Hi-Five Studio | Milwaukee

Milwaukee Recording Studio. Recording, Mixing, Mastering, Voiceover, Wisconsin Recording Studio

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You dont get it. 99 percent of people listen to music. And they are in that comfortable situation not having there speakers on a table and in 80cm distance.

So would you recomend this shiit cubes over even a shiit canton to them? Or what you call a a shiit LP6?

 

[Mnyb]

+0,02$ this is not an original auratone speakers , it's something similar but actually much worse ? ( as seen in data presented here in this tread ).

Grottier grotbox grottiest grotbox how do you "win" this race ? idea why not monitor using motherboard speakers from some old 386 or a clock radio inside a pillow ?

Product is completely nonsense.

The original auratone migth have some following for historical reasons . but a lookalike product is not the original thing , the manufacturer should have tried to actually replicate the original speakers response and sound exactly then maybe just maybe this is not a nonsense product ?

 

[tomtoo]

Costumer: Could you recomend a good knife?
Pro: sure

Costumer: But i dont eat fish

Pro: But its still a good fish knive.

 

[bennybbbx]

You dont get it. 99 percent of people listen to music. And they are in that comfortable situation not having there speakers on a table and in 80cm distance.

this mix cubes are called Near field Monitors . which mean they are design to work in a studio near field and not at large distance in livingroom hearing. there come more reverb of the room and it sound even more washy in bass. not so precise for mixing.

So would you recomend this shiit cubes over even a shiit canton to them? Or what you call a a shiit LP6?

I have not hear it. I have the opinion better a fewer bass big soundstage as a boomy bass worse soundstage. thats matter of taste. the speakers are for nearfield. if you hear mid or farfield the speakers are not for you in general and not in general shit. the kali LP 6 is labeld as a near field speaker and i think it is very worse for this. as mid field speaker 2-3 meter way it is ok. kali itself tell lp 6 should be 1.5 meter away. thats not nearfield .

we also have not this important parameter QTS from all speakers. i really like buy and test a speaker with QTs 0.5

Interviews

Interview zum Lautsprecherbau

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Which qualities of Qts make sense for the closed box:

- QTs = 0.5 is for high-end music listeners with almost no deep bass output

- Qts = 0.577 (Bessel characteristic) with ideal phase behavior but low bass output

- Qts = 0.7-0.9 for all-round listeners, with Qtc=0.707 (Butterworth) often being given as the optimum.

- Qts > 0.9 ??? for supporters of maximum bass output for closed cabinets, which often sounds a bit boomy.

 

[Geert]

The "Fast Car" is said to be the most revealing in the set of records that were used to evaluate a subjective preferences for the set of speakers tested

Now that is correct (by Sean Olive by the way, not Toole) Which means there probably are thousands of other records as revealing or maybe even better (especially if Fast Car is not your thing).

 

[EquilibriumAudio]

+0,02$ this is not an original auratone speakers , it's something similar but actually much worse ? ( as seen in data presented here in this tread ).

Grottier grotbox grottiest grotbox how do you "win" this race ? idea why not monitor using motherboard speakers from some old 386 or a clock radio inside a pillow ?

Product is completely nonsense.

The original auratone migth have some following for historical reasons . but a lookalike product is not the original thing , the manufacturer should have tried to actually replicate the original speakers response and sound exactly then maybe just maybe this is not a nonsense product ?

Full time studio engineer and gear tech here. Have owned a couple different pairs of real soundcubes powered by various amps. These are definitely the right comments. Somehow Avantone managed to actually create a 'better' spec'd Auratone that still sounds like crap, but also took everything that made the Auratone a useful reference and made it go away. Huge failure of a product imo.

 

[badspeakerdesigner]

I 'd like to PM you tomorrow if you allow.
we are a little offtopic here, although not totaly

Sure go for it.

 

[Chez]

Reputation is well deserved:

Score is -3.4 which tells everything you need to know about it...

With an EQ you can flatten things a bit:
View attachment 270915
If you like the form factor, they are much better options. I do like the KS Digital C5 for example.

View attachment 270914
which at least as a reasonable frequency response.

You will find more graphs and more data at www.spinorama.org

PRICEY

 

[tomtoo]

this mix cubes are called Near field Monitors . which mean they are design to work in a studio near field and not at large distance in livingroom hearing. there come more reverb of the room and it sound even more washy in bass. not so precise for mixing.




I have not hear it. I have the opinion better a fewer bass big soundstage as a boomy bass worse soundstage. thats matter of taste. the speakers are for nearfield. if you hear mid or farfield the speakers are not for you in general and not in general shit. the kali LP 6 is labeld as a near field speaker and i think it is very worse for this. as mid field speaker 2-3 meter way it is ok. kali itself tell lp 6 should be 1.5 meter away. thats not nearfield .

we also have not this important parameter QTS from all speakers. i really like buy and test a speaker with QTs 0.5

Interviews

Interview zum Lautsprecherbau

www.lautsprechershop.de

From my point of view, get a good fullrange(not this) 3.5 to 4 inch construct a closed case maybe with bessel Q. Not much bass. But if your so fixated that should be the best.

 

[bennybbbx]

A easy test if a speaker is good enough for your hearing compare for example this song with headphone and speaker.

there is left and right a guitar and bass is play at higher notes in middle in same frequency as guitars (around 100 hz) so it is in avantones play range too.
all speakers i hear can not do this as good as headphones.

maybe avantone owners can compare with there other speakers if you can hear the bass better in avantone or auratone

in headphone i can clear in the middle hear the bass. I can hear attack transients and groove it play. on speakers the bass sound wider and jump between left and right a little and it is not clear hearable as in headphones. thats propably happen because left and right speaker need play much diffrent. so sometimes left speaker reach his level faster, sometimes right speaker . make it mono does not help. to locate the bass in the guitars need ITD hearing. people that lost it get so called coctailparty effect. they can when more people speak at diffrent positions not clear hear each voice

 

[welsh]

I agree. I remember them showing up way back when, just after a fad for running out to the parking lot with cassettes, to "evaluate" how your mix would sound in the car. Both were used as ways to demonstrate how cool and advanced you were, and how you went the extra mile. It was a performative fashion, and basically useless as far as mix quality or translation was concerned. I spent thousands of hours in dozens of places with Auratones perched in front of me, and never used them once - nor did I see anyone else use them. They were purely decorative credibility-claiming items, like the gold discs in the corridor. Or obligatory accessories, like the ashtrays.

Talking of obligatory accessories, it wasn’t just the ashtrays. I have it on good authority that mixing consoles in the seventies sometimes featured small flat-mounted mirrors. Can’t imagine what that was all about…

 

[mhardy6647]

Talking of obligatory accessories, it wasn’t just the ashtrays. I have it on good authority that mixing consoles in the seventies sometimes featured small flat-mounted mirrors. Can’t imagine what that was all about…

There were lines on the mirror, lines on her face
She pretended not to notice she was caught up in the race...

 

[ces04848]

I think the point of this speaker was missed...

 

[Geert]

I think the point of this speaker was missed...

Use it for the studio intercom?

 

[Postlan]

I worked at major studios in the '90s, and although the Auratone was already somewhat obsolete, it was still often in the studio. When checking with a small speaker, we usually used the speaker built into Studer's master recorder.

By the time Avantone was released, most of our production had moved to the private studios, but frankly I didn't think it was necessary and Sony boomboxes were trustful enough to check the translation. I honestly think it's just an overpriced studio gadget. It's true that the Auratone has a very interesting and attractive sound, but I have no idea why the Avantone is still being sold and who is using it for what. If it were $50-100, it would be a nice holiday gift for musicians.

 

[Hexspa]

The idea that there is some "usefulness for translation" variable just seems too simplistic to me. Even the preference score, which has a narrowly defined objective(determine which speakers are preferred by music listeners when you are listening, at moderate volume, primarily to reflections, and in a typical domestic room), is only a general sorting tool, NOT an unimpeachable objective score that tells you which speaker is better.

What seems to be happening is that you and other mixers that use these tools are doing it to accentuate certain instruments, FR, or other attributes so that you can rebalance them without all the other "noise" that is not relevant to that task. Makes perfect sense to me.

The real question is why would you want to use different speakers for that? If you figure out exactly what's going on it should be trivial to emulate it with DSP and in fact the DSP should be able to do an even better job because only the changes you absolutely want will be in there. Which is not something you can control with an unmodified MixCube.

Maybe the DSP solutions for this on the market now are not good enough, but the only way to fix that would be to do a series of research studies on audio engineers themselves. I doubt asking for anecdotes is going to help at all with deriving a general theory of translation. Because like it or not, there is a still a lot of subjective delusion among audio engineers, and in order to get good data you will need to filter that out. Whether by blind testing or some other method.

Thanks for your reply; I don’t know why I didn’t respond. I think you have some solid points but also some shaky ones.

A translation score would be equally simplistic to a preference score. General sorting and impeachability or not, it doesn’t exist for loudspeaker usefulness as a nearfield tool. Since there may be a difference between a speaker’s likelihood for translation and listener preference, this is unresolved by your response. Plus, I don’t like the word “better” in this discussion because it’s a vague subjective term. Please refer to higher preference score, more satisfactory translation, flatter SPL, lower distortion or other objective metric. Again, better may refer to one metric or another but not necessarily all of them. For our purposes, we can describe translation as what a mixer expects to hear and then actually hears across various playback systems.

About your point that the speaker is a passive filter, we agree. I’ve already stated that this is a possibility - the mid-push theory - which goes along with the hearing aid theory (mixers use speakers to compensate for hearing damage). In any case, we agree but others have already mentioned it.

I never said “I want to use multiple loudspeakers” or that I think it’s an inherently beneficial strategy. What I think is that, relating to your DSP argument, it’s just easier as of now to achieve certain characteristics in the physical domain such as directivity or distortion in particular. Also, though theoretically DSP-achievable, it may be easier to use a different speaker to obtain a particular SPL response; for instance if DSP is unavailable in a given system. Besides this misrepresentation of my position, I agree that DSP is powerful and has many advantages like you note. To what degree it can take a given loudspeaker and turn it into another depends but I think most will agree that if you want the performance of Speaker A, just use Speaker A instead of trying to DSP Speaker B into Speaker A. It’s a one-way street at best: you’re never turning a JBL Control One into a Neumann KH 420.

I’m not looking for “anecdotes” pertaining to translation: another misrepresentation. What I want is equal rigor applied to the investigation of translation as was done for preference.

The crux is such: many mixers say things like “flat speakers sound bright” or “too gentle in the midrange” or they “can’t get good translation” out of high-preference speakers. These are actual quotes from supposed professionals and not a Devil’s Advocate argument.

Of course, mix engineers are not omniscient - however they pretend - and are subject to human bias. Believe me, I’m not going to their feet looking for answers to this question. I argued against them on Gearspace and was unceremoniously removed from the discussion by the moderators. Interestingly, there I was arguing in favor of objective data whereas here I’m arguing that their bias against flat speakers might have merit.

Your last statement is the only one with which I can agree without qualification except that I’ve already stated this is what I want to see happen.

In summary: mix engineers don’t always prefer to work on flat speakers which means preference score might not apply to mixing. Of course, it could just mean that the complaining engineers are outliers or that it’s a natural margin of error for the preference score itself. Regardless, no formal investigation has been done to settle this discrepancy. Even if you think my arguments are bad or that this line of inquiry is pointless, you can’t dispute that last statement. You can try but, afaik, nobody has done this and I think it could be worthwhile.

For what it’s worth, my mixcube is still in the box Amir returned it to me in. I’ve been trying to use my HS50s in isolation with DSP and it’s been harder to mix I think. That’s just an anecdote because I’ve had the cube for a decade and have only been doing this for about a month. Also, I haven’t tried creating the mixcube’s response exactly; actually, I think it’ll be nearly impossible because the HS50 is not flat. I’d have to first flatten it then unflatten it and even then the directivity, distortion, and LF cutoff due to port will all be different - a notable challenge to the DSP argument. It’s hard for me to remain neutral but, honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if I dig out the mixcube and keep using it no matter what speakers I get. Either that or I’ll get used to another way. Who knows.

It’s been a fun chat but, please, I don’t want to debate the merits of the speaker or whether it can be emulated or how flawed system X or people group Y are. The only investigation worth pursuing at this point is whether or not the people who say flat speakers don’t translate have meat on that statement or not. For the record, I am not saying that. I am simply interested by the discrepancy and would like to read the results of someone else’s tests into it because I’m probably not going to do it.

Thanks

 

[deejaystu]

I think the point of this speaker was missed...

Yup.. These are reference monitors and safe to say they’re standard in every major recording studio I’ve stepped into. I own a pair along with two other sets of studio monitors (KRK VXT, and Adam Audio A7V). Speaking from my own experience, they actually do help quite a bit when mixing/mastering the tough and muddy frequencies (true mono 200hz range). They don’t sound sweet by design, they reveal any impurities in your mix, and also help adjusting levels of individual instrument tracks. I really hope no one is using these for movie/music consumption