today i visited a music store. tried hardware synths. listened to new monitors. genelec. krk and other

i will tell you THE DIFFERENCE between my setup home was not that BIG. the only difference was the music sounded more open and smooth.

a waste of money if you buy such expensive monitors.. you wont get better sound. get cheaper monitors
also some synths are WAY too big in size like a whole kitchen table. they have so many controls and knobs its confusing. all in all its good but now i know what to buy next.. what surprised me was how small some synths are! THE JD ROLAND.. and the ROLAND AIRA synthline. the bigger synths like MODX and FANTOM looked fantastic but they were so HUGE!

 

Last edited: Apr 13, 2024

It is oftentimes better to remain quiet and be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt.

 

i tell you what i think this is my opinion. maybe your ears work diffrently, maybe you heard sound in 5 D what do i know man?

 

I think if you have music that is already mastered properly the difference might not seem to be that big because the reason for mixing and mastering is for a track to sound decent on as many devices as possible. So yes, it should sound relatively “good” on inferior devices too.
The real question is if you are able to make better mixing decisions using better monitors. This will of course depend on your room a lot too. If your room is not treated properly, you might not see as big of a benefit, if any, using better monitors.

 

When it comes to monitors, microphones, processing hardware such as preamps, compressors and eq units there is no huge jump in quality in most cases, only incremental steps as the price rises. Is a Ferrari 30 times better a car than a Ford Fiesta? They both get you from A to B.

I recently traded in a Klark Teknik KT-2A for an Audioscape Opto. The difference is not a factor of 3 better in sound quality but the Audioscape is WAY nicer compared to the less expensive and cheaply built clone of the LA-2A and much better to both my ear and workflow that I can say that it is well worth the cost.

 

Last edited: Apr 14, 2024

The thing is, price and quality don't scale proportionally. For twice the price, you get less than twice the quality. But if you ask if there's a recognizable difference between nearfileds for 400 bucks a pair and full rangers for 10K a piece, the answer is a crystal clear, yes.

 

Some of this is now driven by Reverb.com users. A while back, Reverb began encouraging users to list everything in their studio/ gear list. So they write everything up, take pictures, mark it that they are open to offers, and it just sits there. This is stuff people had no original intention of selling, but if someone is willing to pay a "I really don't want to sell this" price; and it wouldn't be a problem.

But the issue is that they don't sell, and if they do it is for nowhere close to the prices they put on the unit. When the next person lists the same item, they will think their $200 item is really worth $1000. It's not based on reality. Some of the prices people do pay for stuff on there are lunacy. I have sold a number of items where this happened. At first you think it's some kind of scam, because surely no-one would pay that price for whatever. But they do. I have sold a few items where I felt like I should have worn a ski mask to drop something off at UPS.

 

The word Vintage these days seems to be used, in a lot of cases, simply as an excuse to charge an arm an a leg for just about anything that "looks" like it came from an atomic testing area or a military salvage yard. Simply because it is "rare" in many cases doesn't necessarily make it useful - the same goes for gear labeled "vintage"... "Rare" can simply mean that the device was simply too shitty even back in the day to have made a profit for whatever company or individual who made the device. Just because it's old does not make it useful. A lot of vintage gear, even the most exceptional stuff comes with the caveat of buyer beware in the fact that a lot of the parts that give a particular device its signature characteristics are not even available in this day and age. Hence the tube in that very expensive "vintage" tube microphone will someday in the not too distant future end up becoming a very expensive paper-weight if the tube ever shits the bed...

Of course there is the whole under-belly market for used/vintage gear that IS (or was) operationally exceptional when it was new and still holds up today. These are the pieces that don huge price tags because everyone knows that they are capable of doing great things aurally. I will always get a laugh at companies who market new gear that is supposed to mimic or "be just like" a piece of great vintage gear. I get even heartier chuckles out of software plugin dev's who market their next piece of "wonder-code" sporting the all-too-familiar tattered & weathered photo-shopped front panel with cobwebs hanging from it or whatever... Like that interface is somehow going to psycho-acoustically sound better than it actually does just by looking at it...

 

Thanks for the reminder.
I was struggling to determine how far I could afford to go into the upper audio range...that I can't hear anyway.


Ok...partly kidding there but that kind of thinking can save some money.

 

have you ever tried those chinese copies of hardware?
i have bought a few guitar pedals and a mixing console and the value for the money is unbeatable.
if i was looking only at value for money id never buy any famous brand gear, just chinese copies.
but not always the best value for money is enough for our needs. Sometimes you really need that "small difference" in sound.

as the saying goes, the devil is in the details

 

I remember i sold a chinese Fuzz pedal that sounded great for like 10 bucks to buy a big muff pi.
Unfortunately the big muff i got sounded like shit.

 

Some of those "small differences" (which are not really small anyway); can mean the thing may fall apart, maybe have a nice electrical shortage that causes a fire, or other "small differences" like lead paint being used. Destined for a landfill.

 

lol, according to someone very famous in the industry, Daft Punk cheapest monitor set is around USD100k and they got super big collection of it. 3/4 of the whole studio total assets is the monitors collection alone. They got more than 100 synths and drum machines and 3 walls filled with guitars and basses too. What a bunch of morons those helmet wearing clowns eh ?

 

Last edited: Apr 14, 2024

Maybe you need those kinds of reference monitors just to make a Alesis 3630 sound good.

 

The internet has a permeating trend that the less educated you are on a topic, the wiser you must be. Well-educated professionals who work in the industry are all being ripped off by manufacturers because they're not wise enough to see through it. It's like Dan Worrell's argument on summing mixers. It's easy to make anything a conspiracy if you don't understand it sufficiently.

I suggest reading a few books on speaker design. You could start by researching voice coil cooling designs; as the heat increases, so does resistance, reducing the speaker's efficiency and making it sound worse than when you first started. You might also want to research further into transient response, excursion factors, amplification, and baffle design as a start. Then, you can make an informed opinion rather than a ridiculous statement.

 

The *absolute most important thing* in my opinion is that you also listen enough professionally mastered stuff (like other music than your own) on the same monitors, so you know what on that monitor well mastered stuff should sound like. Also, I think it's very valuable to have different monitors and you can change back and forth. They might be cheap speakers or what not. It also helps if you listen to music on them. This will give you an all round impression on how your music sounds on different devices.
I personally have not experienced much better mixing results on professional monitors. I had have the impression I had the best mixing results on monitors I had in my early twenties that were not even made for this. They were good pc speakers from that time (altec lansing acs500's and acs250 subwoofer) and I listed to a lot of music on them too. I sitll like the mixes I did o nthose back then and more often disliek the ones I did on bigger studio monitors. So I have been thinking about buying some second hand ones and see if mixing feels easier again, but it does not even see they were released in my part of the world, which them hard to find or simply needlessly expensive in shipping costs.

 

Last edited: Apr 14, 2024

my point is about priorities, despite having all those eye watering mil dollars expensive cool instruments because they can, they still spend more on the monitoring equipment, understanding its importance.

 

Nothing beats the hands on controller, be it hard or software, it´s like women with all the sliders and knobs, you just have to learn them, even if it takes space