Yes, best practice. Not so sure about very elite. More like very common.

Dan

Home theater is common. Something that would pass for THX? Not so much. This compounded by the fact it's hard to contain a sound with a 160' wavelength in the average living room. I'm quite certain I get better use of my neighbor's sub than he does.

I don't think your neighbor is bothered by his 'out an about' earthquake. I'm assuming you can't hear this but it rumbles and rattles your house? It does make you wonder about the structural integrity of his. Might not be one you want to pick up if it's ever FS. I actually checked how mine is when I have movie night. It's hard to contain even a 50 ft wave. Seriously, THX cert is quite common nowadays and easy to find, own, and operate. Parametric EQ is part of it. THX mixing cert is still expensive. Last I heard $12000 not including equipment/environment of course. Yes I know the methods all fly in the face of old school dogma. The old train of thought still has relevance and it is the foundation, it' just been advanced. You know, we'd have flying cars if people could learn to operate and afford to own them. ha ha Fortunately learning to make and use an accurate monitoring environment is much easier and cheaper.

Dan

No, I get rumble and actual pitches I can name.
You're quite right about alternatives to cars. The jet pack was perfected in the 1950's. Now if that had 'taken off' imagine the air traffic control nightmare!

You must live in an apartment or that guy is deaf? It's got to be a punishable noise violation. Of course if you are loud at times, just let bygones be bygones and leave the Mossberg 590 USMC edition in the closet. Winter's not over, you may still need that rock salt.

Dan

Nope. Live in a house. The neighbor lives in a house. The guy four houses down lives in a house. The guy two streets over lives in a house. All of them have subwoofers. None of them have THX rooms. Here is where I would normally go into my rant about how in our society the average person can't hear worth a damn. When I live in city limits it is just a constant rumble on my ears. When I lived in Chicago it was much much worse. Don't eat Lake Michigan fish by the way. At least in San Diego there was also the pounding of the surf. Don't even get me started on John Q Public and his smiley faced graphic equalizer. As to salt, the '59 GMC pick em up has never let me down yet. Summers I spend in Yellowstone on purpose to ease my ears.

You got some crazy neighbors Jack. Sounds (PTP) like where I lived when I went to college. I guess it's a good thing they don't have THX systems.

That's a sweet truck! I gotta get me one of those some day. I love old cars/trucks.

Dan

At some point, I was strangely under the impression that I would be finding some useful advice regarding $500 monitors in this thread. Instead, it seems to be a hodgepodge of theory and science on room design, audiology, psycology, marketing and real estate. Not saying that stuff isn't related, but he S:N in here is quite low. Can we fix that in post?

Check out Dan' blog.

The long and short of it is there isn't hardly anyting per pair for under $500 that is decent. If you are in a big enough city and can try prior to purchase, used JBL are a good bet. Sometimes though rarely used Genelec of one type or another.

I think for $500-700 considering used equipment (If they aren't abused speakes should be great even used) should be able to buy a set of active monitors that will not be the weakest point in a budget studio signal chain. Mackie hr8's seem to regularly show up on ebay for around 400-500/pr. With many similar brand models of 6 and 8 inch woofers and knowlegable sound treatment of the space, acceptable mixing results should be very possible for many applications. Sure you won't be getting the results of a $2k monitor setup but it should provide acceptable results for budget studios looking to get a usable platform to begin from. If your work is so critical that this isn't acceptable, you should be making enough to afford gear that performs to a much higher standard. But I think that budget studios have a lot of moderate options in the 500-700 dollar range.

There is quite a bit usable in the $500-800 range especially if one opens the used market. Regardless of where you fall in the 6" v 8" speaker for nearfields, the Mackie HR6 outperforms the 8.

The problem is that the thread and 90% of beginners want under $500...and usually way under. A beginner just can't get good results on cheap inaccurate monitors. And I mean not just accurate for a frequency range sine wave sweep but real life music involving transients and quality bass response.

For small rooms, the 6 may well out perform the 8 in some regards, and not in others. Depends on what you need. For instance in a bedroom situation (1500 cubic feet) you don't need the power of 500 watts to fully power a mix position 4 feet away. The transient and detail performance (I'm assuming this is the performance advantage of the 6 you are referring to) may be the critical factor in this situation. When I had my HR8's in my old apartment bedroom, they were beyond powerful enough, and even caused a ton of low end problems due to the untreated room's awful modal issues.

In my living room (3500+ cubic feet), I find the 8 to be at the upper end of its output range when at reference level, even with the low support of a 300 watt (RMS) Elemental Designs sub, crossing over at 47hz (compared to the 8's lowest of 37hz.) For critical mixing, I usually just use the sub for double checking things.

I work with a lot of post-production audio for film and TV, and the extended lows of the 8's and even the sub are hugely important for picking up wind rumble on microphones. With my the sub off, that kind of rumble can be seen as a lot less of an issue than it actually is.

Clarity may be the most important issue, and in a smaller situation, a 6" design may be tighter and give the best clarity. Still, at the ~500 price point, the 8's are a very decent way to get a usable 500 watt RMS (pair) monitoring setup. 500 watts of A quality sound (made up grade) or 280 watts of A+ sound? Depends what your needs are.

I agree 100% with you that the 500-700 range REALLY opens up a lot of great choices for very useful monitor solutions. If there were some magic bullet $300 pair of monitors that gave Genelec performance, this kind of thread would be very short lived because the price would really be in reach of hobbyists and budding musicians and engineers who may not be making tons of money on their craft to afford their system upgrades. It all depends on how much "Pro" you can afford and how much you need. Mixing demos and generally indulging a hobby? Then you may be able to justify a $300 set. Doing a serious mix or offering low-end professional services probably requires something north of 500-600. Professionals who are staking their reputation and career on their mixes will obviously not settle for less than the best. And each range can rightly afford to spend on the proper equipment AND can also live with the performance (or lack of) provided by each product bracket.

My mother is a quilter and the quilting world is similar. A lot of women (and men) do it as a hobby but get nabbed by the portion of the community that insists that you need the $$$$$ sewing machines, tables, and studio space in order to make a quilt properly. I won't argue that the upper end gear has its place and also that you REALLY DO get what you pay for. But sometimes what you need to get isn't pure monitor perfection. But it sure is what we would all like!!!

Best regards!

You make some great points. I might just add that your usage of an 8" monitor is more mid field than nearfield but otherwise can't argue much at all.

Yep, I currently sit about 5 feet from my monitors, or use them for theater at about 6 feet. My living room/studio is adjoined with my dining room so the total space (3500-4000 cubic ft.) is quite a lot larger than most situations where low budget rooms are used. It is not the typical bedroom/spare room sized space. I think the biggest thing I've learned since moving from bedroom to that space is that the space has a HUGE impact on how a certain pair of speakers perform and also sound overall.

TheJackAttack, post: 368497 wrote: There is quite a bit usable in the $500-800 range especially if one opens the used market. Regardless of where you fall in the 6" v 8" speaker for nearfields, the Mackie HR6 outperforms the 8.

The problem is that the thread and 90% of beginners want under $500...and usually way under. A beginner just can't get good results on cheap inaccurate monitors. And I mean not just accurate for a frequency range sine wave sweep but real life music involving transients and quality bass response.

FWIW Jack, I know your not one to believe is what science has shown but allow me to entertain some thoughts here. A beginner is not likely to get good results on anything..... Though I know some that have. Now, here comes the stuff to ponder: Loudspeakers are largely linear devices and can be modeled as such over quite an SPL range especially when we are discussing the near field. Yes, a FR graph won't tell you much, but polar graphs certainly will--several axes of frequency plots. If the lines are smooth, you know the decay is essentially less than the 1/2 wavelength time. Please don't discuss CSDs here and their relationship to audible resonances--it's pro audio mythology. They have never been shown to have a positive correlation to audibility. In fact, the way they are generated has nothing to do with how/what humans hear. Wavelets however..... :) Polar and power ripples definitely do as well. IOW, resonances need to be psychoacoustically significant and we have several meaningful ways to display them that manufacturers rarely show until you get into the high end monitors. I'd agree that $500 is too little if you want great monitors, but some of the cheapos are still pretty good and will do for the hobbyist. By the time you correct for the deficits in cheap monitors if your so inclined, adding subs or modifying the speakers, etc..., you'd have been better off to just buying good monitors. IOW, buy the best you can reasonably afford, if there is a cheap or nearly free tweak that actually improves the performance do it. Otherwise just leave it be. This is certainly not a subwoofer indictment either, but they are less important that good monitors for all the obvious reasons.

Dan

Dan, I do believe in Science. I have studied advanced physics and mathematics. In fact, I don't have much if any contention with this particular post of yours absent the initial thought. Science doesn't teach us that a two dimensional plot can easily display a three dimensional phenomenon. That is my main reason why I state that graphs are a starting point, a beginning to the discussion, and not a complete representation. This is true not least of which because manufacturers own specifications and graphs are rarely of useful information. Your home built polar graphs certainly go a lot farther towards modeling accurate representation of a given speaker's performance even should we disagree on the ultimate percentage of importance of those same two dimensional modelings.

More importantly, as long as we categorize the cheap end of the spectrum as "getting by" or "good enough" and not putting them on equal footing with monitors that are actually good and useful then we would agree more often than not I suspect. I do think though I didn't post it before that RScott's observations about his room/listening environment supports something we try to harp on here all the time. Basically, get one's monitoring environment in good shape acoustically as much as reasonably possible if one wants great results. Then learn your speakers intimately and objectively.

We usually do agree on what we are ultimately recommending, but our stated reasoning is often different. To me, scientific reasoning needs to be understood by people looking for gear so they can have the amo to shoot down a bad decision and aggressive salesmen. That's doubly so for the inexperienced who have never heard great gear in great rooms and are hoping to get their feet wet on the cheap. They may think they are hearing something great or something terrible, but it's just a particular circumstance of the moment(too many variables to state them all--recording, brand bias, EQing, peer pressure, etc...). Data is unwavering, man's perception is highly labile.

Personally if I were to design an audio system from scratch in any prebuilt room, I'd start with 1) the speakers first according to the ultimate goal;near/far field and image vs. envelopment and placement restrictions, also source components based on needs, 2) then placement of them and your listening position in the room, 3) then treatment to maximize bass performance, the desired time domain performance; sense of space/image/envelopment, and bass processing in the listening position last to minimize what can't reasonably fixed otherwise. That's sort of the opposite of what you are saying. Mine is based on controlled experimental evidence where the acoustics has been shown to be less important than the source though beneficial none the less and empirical evidence that placement strategies are far more cost effective than treatment. Believe it or not a friend that designs and sell acoustic treatments told me that--get you placement as best you can first.

Still, in the current, deplorable state of audio, unless you are going high end pro, there's just not enough available for anyone to make an intelligent decision on bang for the buck. Though my blog has a little quality data(thanks for the compliment Jack!), but nothing like what Genelec is showing for their best monitors. It seems all the high end stuff that has performance data available is good enough that you can be assured they will work well. Now for the 99% of available gear..... The little JBLs measure very well in the sub $500 category.

Dan