Howdy ASR. I've had some thoughts I wanted to share and contrast with others related to mixing music and open baffle speakers. Convention tells me not to bother but having not heard OB before my own experiments, I had to find out. Their function certainly has some supposed benefits that are appealing to me but I'm also quite skeptical of much of the claims I hear.
I setup a simple full range driver (Peerless TC9) on top of my tower speakers and filtered them appropriately with active filters (crossed around 600hz to a ported 7" woofer), tuned it all neutral, standard diy speaker affair. My initial listening impressions were kind of meh. It is a fullrange driver so the top end was just ok. It sounded kinda phasey and I'm not sure why, the width of the sound was strange, they felt wide but also narrow at the same time, as if the sounds radiation sort of runs into an invisible wall. Perhaps this is the full range driver beaming, I expected the beaming to make for a narrow sweet spot but that wasn't really the case. It mostly just made the HF information more localized to the speaker. My ear with what I assume is tube dysfunction seems to have appreciated a certain pressurization of the OB speaker. I do not know if this is correct at all but it felt like the speaker was pressurizing the room less if that makes sense.
Alright, time to load up a project and try to mix it. This part surprised me. I do genuinely feel that I was able to hear various elements of what I was doing better than I have on my boxed monitors. There are some areas that I have trouble with that can often feel like EQ movements are just not reacting in a manner that correlates with the EQ, but with these OB speakers I felt I could hear EQ movements much more precisely. I felt it was a bit easier to give track elements their own space EQ wise. As far stereo stuff goes, panning was strange to me and not particularly easy to deduce. Curiously one of the biggest surprises came in playing with stereo width of a track, be it a single track or the master bus. I utilize a few mid/side tools to achieve some perceived width increases and it was VERY apparent as to what these tools were doing. With my boxed monitors these tools generally delivered what felt like width but I could never hear what they were doing nearly as well as I could on these OB speakers. The smallest of application of M/S processing was very audible.
Overall mix translation felt good, tracks sounded how they were supposed to over various devices. I'd argue I was able to get the results I wanted a bit faster on the OB speaker, which means less trips back to the studio and less rendering and tweaking. At this point I'm not sure what to think. There's certainly a lot of good research on what makes a conventionally good monitor but other than the neutral response the OB speakers seem to go against convention, but here I am with results that make me want to keep going. I'm not too hesitant to make an lx521 clone to see what a more robust OB speaker can do for me.
Shot in the dark but has anyone else tried mixing on OB speakers?
I setup a simple full range driver (Peerless TC9) on top of my tower speakers and filtered them appropriately with active filters (crossed around 600hz to a ported 7" woofer), tuned it all neutral, standard diy speaker affair. My initial listening impressions were kind of meh. It is a fullrange driver so the top end was just ok. It sounded kinda phasey and I'm not sure why, the width of the sound was strange, they felt wide but also narrow at the same time, as if the sounds radiation sort of runs into an invisible wall. Perhaps this is the full range driver beaming, I expected the beaming to make for a narrow sweet spot but that wasn't really the case. It mostly just made the HF information more localized to the speaker. My ear with what I assume is tube dysfunction seems to have appreciated a certain pressurization of the OB speaker. I do not know if this is correct at all but it felt like the speaker was pressurizing the room less if that makes sense.
Alright, time to load up a project and try to mix it. This part surprised me. I do genuinely feel that I was able to hear various elements of what I was doing better than I have on my boxed monitors. There are some areas that I have trouble with that can often feel like EQ movements are just not reacting in a manner that correlates with the EQ, but with these OB speakers I felt I could hear EQ movements much more precisely. I felt it was a bit easier to give track elements their own space EQ wise. As far stereo stuff goes, panning was strange to me and not particularly easy to deduce. Curiously one of the biggest surprises came in playing with stereo width of a track, be it a single track or the master bus. I utilize a few mid/side tools to achieve some perceived width increases and it was VERY apparent as to what these tools were doing. With my boxed monitors these tools generally delivered what felt like width but I could never hear what they were doing nearly as well as I could on these OB speakers. The smallest of application of M/S processing was very audible.
Overall mix translation felt good, tracks sounded how they were supposed to over various devices. I'd argue I was able to get the results I wanted a bit faster on the OB speaker, which means less trips back to the studio and less rendering and tweaking. At this point I'm not sure what to think. There's certainly a lot of good research on what makes a conventionally good monitor but other than the neutral response the OB speakers seem to go against convention, but here I am with results that make me want to keep going. I'm not too hesitant to make an lx521 clone to see what a more robust OB speaker can do for me.
Shot in the dark but has anyone else tried mixing on OB speakers?
