Studio Monitors: Does Any of This Make Sense?

Excellent mixes have been made on modest monitors, but that does not make every loudspeaker equally accurate. The important question is how an engineer learns a monitoring system—and where its limitations become consequential.

Is there anything in the audio industry quite as bizarre as studio monitors?

Think about it.

At one end of the spectrum, we have little Auratones and their modern Avantone counterparts. At the other, enormous systems from companies like Augspurger and Kinoshita that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And between those extremes, there are literally hundreds of different monitors, each promising to tell us the truth about what we’re recording.

They can’t all be right, can they?

And yet, somehow, people manage to do extraordinary work on just about all of them.

The NS-10 Paradox

Perhaps the greatest example of this absurdity is the Yamaha NS-10.

For something approaching four decades, the NS-10 has been one of the most recognizable speakers in professional recording studios. The funny thing is that it wasn’t originally designed to be a studio monitor at all.

It was a relatively inexpensive little hi-fi speaker.

And not a particularly remarkable one.

Yet it became an industry standard. Walk into a major recording studio during the 1980s or 1990s, and there was a very good chance you’d find a pair of NS-10s sitting on the meter bridge, usually with their distinctive white woofers staring back at you.

I remember those days. In the ’80s, replacing NS-10 woofers was practically a routine maintenance operation in some studios. I won’t say it happened every weekend, but it certainly happened multiple times a year. Those little drivers could be pushed so hard that it sometimes seemed as though they were about to launch themselves out of the cabinets.

And yet people kept using them.

Not just anybody, either.

Chris Lord-Alge, Bob Clearmountain, and countless other extraordinarily talented engineers made some of the most successful and best-sounding records of the last several decades while relying heavily on NS-10s.

Of course, they had other monitoring systems available. And some have since moved on to different speakers.

But the point remains: some of the finest mixes in recording history were made using speakers that, judged purely by their technical limitations, were hardly the last word in high-fidelity reproduction.

How do we explain that?

We’re Remarkably Adaptable

I think the answer is actually pretty simple.

Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable.

Give a talented engineer enough time with a particular set of speakers, and that engineer learns what those speakers are telling them.

They learn how much bass should be present, even when the speakers can’t reproduce much of it. They learn what an aggressive midrange sounds like when it’s right, and when it’s wrong. They learn how a vocal should sit, how a kick drum should feel, and how the finished mix should translate to other playback systems.

Eventually, the speakers become almost secondary to the engineer’s understanding of them.

This doesn’t mean that all monitors sound alike, or that their differences are unimportant. They certainly aren’t.

It means that the person sitting in front of them is an enormous part of the equation.

And perhaps a much larger part than the loudspeaker industry would like us to believe.

From Little Boxes to Enormous Systems

Today, the choices are almost overwhelming.

We have tiny single-driver reference speakers, conventional two-way nearfields, sophisticated three-way systems, coaxial monitors, active monitors with DSP correction, and enormous soffit-mounted main monitors capable of reproducing frequencies and sound-pressure levels that would have been unimaginable in a typical control room a few decades ago.

Some are wonderfully accurate. Some are deliberately revealing in particular frequency ranges. Some are simply enjoyable to listen to.

And some cost more than a house.

I’m certainly not suggesting that an inexpensive pair of monitors can do everything a world-class full-range system can do. They can’t. There are obvious advantages to extended low-frequency response, low distortion, controlled directivity, greater dynamic range, and the ability to reproduce music at realistic levels without strain.

Those things matter.

But there’s an equally obvious question: if all those technical advantages are essential to making a great mix, how did so many great mixes get made without them?

The answer, once again, is that engineers learn their monitors.

And What Is Everybody Listening On, Anyway?

There’s another wrinkle to all of this.

The way people listen to music has changed dramatically.

For decades, engineers worried about how their mixes would translate to home stereo systems, car radios, boom boxes, televisions, and eventually computer speakers.

Today, an enormous amount of listening takes place through headphones and earbuds.

And those vary just as wildly as studio monitors.

At one end, we have inexpensive earbuds that were bundled with phones. At the other, sophisticated multi-driver in-ear monitors costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars, some of which are genuinely impressive pieces of audio engineering.

Then there are wireless earbuds with active noise cancellation, adaptive processing, equalization, and other electronics that can substantially change what the listener actually hears.

In other words, even if we could agree on the perfect studio monitor, we would still have absolutely no control over what the audience uses to hear the finished product.

And somehow, great mixes continue to sound great.

Maybe the Best Monitor Is the One You Know

I’ve spent enough time around studio equipment to appreciate genuinely excellent loudspeakers. There are monitors that reveal things others miss, that reproduce low frequencies effortlessly, and that make it easier to hear exactly what’s happening in a recording.

Those are real advantages, and I wouldn’t dismiss them.

But I also think the industry sometimes becomes a little too preoccupied with the idea that there must be one correct monitoring solution.

There isn’t.

A monitor that one engineer finds wonderfully revealing might be fatiguing or distracting to another. A speaker that seems overly bright to one person might be exactly what another needs to produce balanced mixes.

And a technically imperfect speaker that an engineer knows intimately may be a more useful working tool than a technically superior speaker that the engineer hasn’t learned.

Which brings us back to the NS-10.

A modest little hi-fi speaker became one of the most important monitoring tools in recording history. Not because it was the most accurate speaker ever built, but because talented people learned how to make it work for them.

That ought to tell us something.

Ultimately, I think choosing studio monitors comes down to finding something you enjoy working with, something you understand, and something that consistently helps you produce results that sound good to other people.

If you’re happy with what you’re hearing, and the people listening to your work are happy with what they’re hearing, perhaps you’ve already found the right monitors.

Even if they don’t cost $300,000.