Most common studio monitor for mixing and mastering?

[Frgirard]

Just working my way through Toole’s book and one thing he mentioned struck me. He has no qualms about tone controls and thinks they should be more common as he feels no single speaker will be flattering to every program material encountered because of the variations in producers subject preferences. Also many producers mix on sub par monitors like the NS-10M. So if this is the case, why seek out laser flat speakers for playback? Chances are the mix I’m listening to was created on a ...or maybe a . If so, I will need to tweak the playback to hear what was intended anyway. And how do I know? It ends up a subjective experience anyway, right?

Has anyone logged what the most popular monitors the bigger studios use? I’m sure many more are using flat monitors now as Toole’s and others research becomes more well known and accepted, but I listen to a lot of older material that I’m damn sure wasn’t...

you confuse mixing and mastering
what you have on the CD is the result of the mastering
if you want hear the mastering, rente the studio used for.

The flat speaker is a myth. If you has readed Toole you know when the speaker must be flat and when must not be flat.

You can mix on speaker laptop, heaphone.
You can't work on what you can't hear. You don't mix a whole song with NS10.
The most popular is function of the fashion of the time.

A good pro can use any speaker by adaptation.

 

[DSJR]

We had some NS10's domestically to sell. Certainly a bit 'bright' in the upper mids, use on a bookshelf tamed the excess acceptably and the 'vivid' quality used that way was never really painful I remember. used free space in studios must have been a painful experience at times, but I never thought they were used for main mixing, just as a consistent backup.

I think engineers tend to get used to and 'hear through' the monitors they favour. Many stories to tell but others here have so much more experience it's best to let them speak instead.

 

[RobL]

you confuse mixing and mastering
what you have on the CD is the result of the mastering
if you want hear the mastering, rente the studio used for.

The flat speaker is a myth. If you has readed Toole you know when the speaker must be flat and when must not be flat.

You can mix on speaker laptop, heaphone.
You can't work on what you can't hear. You don't mix a whole song with NS10.
The most popular is function of the fashion of the time.

A good pro can use any speaker by adaptation.

This thread isn’t actually about the NS10, it was just brought up as an example used by Toole (page 12 of SR 3rd edition). He notes that there is no universally accepted standard for monitors used in the control room. Monitors are often chosen subjectively by engineers based on how well they are able to “translate” the mix on them. My question is why is it necessary to seek laser flat speakers for music playback when we have no idea what the music was originally mixed on? It is likely that to hear what was originally intended I will need to adjust the spectral balance anyway, right?

 

[Frgirard]

This thread isn’t actually about the NS10, it was just brought up as an example used by Toole (page 12 of SR 3rd edition). He notes that there is no universally accepted standard for monitors used in the control room. Monitors are often chosen subjectively by engineers based on how well they are able to “translate” the mix on them. My question is why is it necessary to seek laser flat speakers for music playback when we have no idea what the music was originally mixed on? It is likely that to hear what was originally intended I will need to adjust the spectral balance anyway, right?

I reply the flat speaker is a myth.
You do not read my previous post.
Toole wrote in his book than people preferred neutral speakers.
The speakers choice is a question of taste.
Again the final result is not the mix but the mastering.
Read what the people write.

 

[dfuller]

Hold on, I work in this field. The mix is where the vast majority of the sound of a track comes from. Mastering is very slight tweaks - maybe +1 dB here and -0.5dB there. The speakers one mixes on absolutely matter to what the final mix sounds like.

 

[paulraphael]

The few mixing engineers I've talked to said they look for two things in their monitors: familiarity, and sound that isn't fatiguing. They treated them as tools for getting a job done. It was less important that the speakers were accurate than that the inaccuracies were a known quantity. And they needed to be able to listen to the things all day long, often loudly.

Some of these guys had been doing this for a long time ... maybe since before accurate monitors were a thing. So they probably got their start using whatever their mentors were using, and stuck with them.

In theory a more accurate speaker would be better. But for an old dog switching to a new trick may not feel very compelling, even if it's a better trick.

 

[Matias]

As far as I know, it is common that the artist asks for their new album to sound like another album, even from another artist. So that the mixing and mastering is not done in to an absolute target, but rather comparatively. So even with subpar speakers making both albums sound unbalanced, as long as the new album sounds similar to the reference album, then the customer will be happy.

 

[Frgirard]

Hold on, I work in this field. The mix is where the vast majority of the sound of a track comes from. Mastering is very slight tweaks - maybe +1 dB here and -0.5dB there. The speakers one mixes on absolutely matter to what the final mix sounds like.

Who compress?

Please, Can you give the definition of a mix?

 

[oursmagenta]

Who compress?

Do (well-done) compression affect tonality?
I wouldn't be so sure.

 

[dfuller]

Who compress?

both.

Do (well-done) compression affect tonality?
I wouldn't be so sure.

It does.

 

[oursmagenta]

both.



It does.

I mean the one done on the mastering part (I have the loudness war in mind).

Edit: it is a totally genuine interrogation from my part. I listened to two albums, one compressed and the other one not compressed. I felt the compressed one was louder but not with actual tonality changes.

Or maybe we don't talk about the same kind of compression.

 

[Ericglo]

Amir's measurements are very valuable, but the commentary, pile-ons and constant Harman this, and Toole that, are infuriatingly boring. At some point people need to climb out from behind their computer screens and go to proper HiFi stores and listen to a large range of speakers. There is no substitute for that. Get in the car, make some appointments, take some music, listen to, and buy some speakers. Maybe there's not a HiFi store on every corner like I grew up with- that's sad, but there's still some around. Find them and make the long suffering owner some money by buying from him- not that online juggernaught.

In the US, we don't have HIFI stores on every street corner, but we do have a lot of Guitar Centers. They do have a lot of the monitors that have been reviewed on this site. I am not sure how Covid has impacted them, but IIRC they did have a listening room.
https://www.guitarcenter.com/Hallandale?N=19631#narrowSideBar

 

[Frgirard]

I mean the one done on the mastering part (I have the loudness war in mind).

Edit: it is a totally genuine interrogation from my part. I listened to two albums, one compressed and the other one not compressed. I felt the compressed one was louder but not with actual tonality changes.

Or maybe we don't talk about the same kind of compression.

Yes we speak about the same thing. The normalisation level or the lufs level.
A bass stay a bass at - 20 lufs or - 9 lufs.
A cd before the loudness war sounds alive at reasonable level.
A cd after the loudness war sounds dead at reasonable level.
For me it changes everything.

i use https://dr.loudness-war.info/ to check.if It's too high i boycott.

 

[oursmagenta]

Yes we speak about the same thing. The normalisation level or the lufs level.
A bass stay a bass at - 20 lufs or - 9 lufs.
A cd before the loudness war sounds alive at reasonable level.
A cd after the loudness war sounds dead at reasonable level.
For me it changes everything.

i use https://dr.loudness-war.info/ to check.if It's too high i boycott.

Ok, I just thought that compression was acting more like a (non-linear ?) distortion machine for group of samples close to clipping level (or gentle clipping ?) than an equalizer.
I will check the math .

 

[Cuniberti]

Has anyone logged what the most popular monitors the bigger studios use?

As a mastering engineer for over 20 years and a recording engineer for nearly 40 years, I can tell you that today there is no standard. The market has been flooded with "pro-studio monitors" ranging in price from $2000 to way beyond 50K. In the mastering world, there are three schools of thought. Build custom monitors (Bernie Grundman) Use Hi-Fi speakers (Bob Ludwig) or off-the-shelf monitors by companies like Genelec, Dynaudio, or PMC. What they all have in common is they have rooms that are purpose build for mastering and are, in many cases, voiced with some form of EQ to produce a relatively flat response. Any engineer will tell that no matter what you use you need to learn the monitor's shortcomings and strengths before you can expect to do professional-level work. That can take years.

 

[Skeptischism]

drum tracks would be nothing without judicious use of compression. there are many different types and styles of compressor.

 

[dfuller]

I mean the one done on the mastering part (I have the loudness war in mind).

Edit: it is a totally genuine interrogation from my part. I listened to two albums, one compressed and the other one not compressed. I felt the compressed one was louder but not with actual tonality changes.

Or maybe we don't talk about the same kind of compression.

That's limiting, which is the mastering engineer's purview generally speaking. And limiters can absolutely introduce tonal changes because pushing them too hard leads to quite a bit of harmonic content being generated. Lookahead brickwall limiters have such fast attack times they almost act like clippers. I remember seeing a presentation Jonathan Wyner did where he demonstrated this pretty clearly with a LF sine wave and a brickwall (I believe Ozone's maximizer, because he has a professional relationship with Izotope) just barely touching the sine and it generated a lot of very clearly audible harmonic info.

As a mastering engineer for over 20 years and a recording engineer for nearly 40 years, I can tell you that today there is no standard. The market has been flooded with "pro-studio monitors" ranging in price from $2000 to way beyond 50K. In the mastering world, there are three schools of thought. Build custom monitors (Bernie Grundman) Use Hi-Fi speakers (Bob Ludwig) or off-the-shelf monitors by companies like Genelec, Dynaudio, or PMC. What they all have in common is they have rooms that are purpose build for mastering and are, in many cases, voiced with some form of EQ to produce a relatively flat response. Any engineer will tell that no matter what you use you need to learn the monitor's shortcomings and strengths before you can expect to do professional-level work. That can take years.

Accurate, though some speakers are easier to learn than others IME. Out of curiosity - what speakers are you using, John?

 

[oursmagenta]

That's limiting, which is the mastering engineer's purview generally speaking. And limiters can absolutely introduce tonal changes because pushing them too hard leads to quite a bit of harmonic content being generated. Lookahead brickwall limiters have such fast attack times they almost act like clippers. I remember seeing a presentation Jonathan Wyner did where he demonstrated this pretty clearly with a LF sine wave and a brickwall (I believe Ozone's maximizer, because he has a professional relationship with Izotope) just barely touching the sine and it generated a lot of very clearly audible harmonic info.

Accurate, though some speakers are easier to learn than others IME. Out of curiosity - what speakers are you using, John?

Ok, I understand that the frontier between compression (a form of non linear distortion that adds harmonics to the signal) and eq (linear distortion) is quite permeable if we look at the whole audible band at once.

 

[Frgirard]

Rob Schnapf who worked with Elliott Smith used or use Harbeth speakers 30. Not a perfect neutral speaker.

 

[Cuniberti]

That's limiting, which is the mastering engineer's purview generally speaking. And limiters can absolutely introduce tonal changes because pushing them too hard leads to quite a bit of harmonic content being generated. Lookahead brickwall limiters have such fast attack times they almost act like clippers. I remember seeing a presentation Jonathan Wyner did where he demonstrated this pretty clearly with a LF sine wave and a brickwall (I believe Ozone's maximizer, because he has a professional relationship with Izotope) just barely touching the sine and it generated a lot of very clearly audible harmonic info.

Accurate, though some speakers are easier to learn than others IME. Out of curiosity - what speakers are you using, John?

Meyer HD-1