yes and no, depends what you look for,

I can honestly say my (much cheaper) Kali Audio IN-8's sound "as good as" my Genelec 8331's yet here's the example:
Kali Audio have annoying self-noise when nothing is playing (it's masked by sound when anything's played), so they're absoutely unusable for any music/speech restoration and denoising,
on the other hand Genelecs have weird sounding bass in music (I blame coaxial dual oval woofers), so they're not joy to listen music to (don't confuse with actual mixing or working with audio),

to be honest, lots of hardware is overpriced, but lots gives you what you pay for (in good or bad way),
I ultimately appreciate variety of options on the market, so anyone can buy what they can afford, and frankly nowadays even very low budget gear is not terrible if you know what compromises to expect

 

I don't want to rain your parade, but a monitor can't make a sound without an input. its an electromechanical device that moves air, it needs energy to move the cones that move the air.

That being said if you are getting noise, when you expect silence, you are getting input into the speakers creating that noise, ie you have a bad ground somewhere. your gain is too high on your preamp etc. or if the speakers are powered the amps are flaky and maybe a capacitor has gone bad. also you may have rf interference from lighting or wifi etc..

 

Last edited: Apr 20, 2024

What we want and what we can afford are not always the same thing.
Based on a moderate budget - Anyone with a moderate budget can get a decent set of monitors , with a mix that should sound good on nearly everything. As for hardware keys, these days, it is possibly money better spent getting a great 88 note MIDI controller as most of the sounds are available in vst synths, rather than a couple of dedicated name synths. I have seen live bands where the keyboard player used a MIDI controller and a laptop sent to his amp. If you did not know that, you would not know the difference. Just an observation. If you want to build a Pro studio, I already assume you have at least half a million to spend as the desk, amps, monitors, wiring and acoustic design alone will cost most, if not all of that, possibly as much as double when you add in outboard gear as well.

Simply, if it does the job well and it's affordable, get it.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Apr 20, 2024

I know what you mean, but no,
it's a known "design limitation", confirmed by Kali Audio, they cheap out anywhere they can, and higher self noise (roughly 12dB over ambience) is what they did try to improve with second generation of their monitors now,
and I "feed" them with RME ADI-2 Dac, fed from optical ADAT of RME HDSPe AIO, so there's no grounding/electrical issues anywhere