Traci Tomlinson wrote:

I am using Mackie Hr824's and I hate them. Honky upper mid and a totally
bogus low end.

Get a room!

Sorry to bust your detailed technical analysis, but this is not at all
true. The low end of the Mackies is quite accurate. The fact that they
HAVE some low end and are putting it into your room is what's screwing
you up. Your room is the problem here, not the speakers. You might be
able to find a position for the speakers that will solve your low-end
problem, but this may involve moving furniture, something that a lot of
people "can't" do. The mids and high mids are somewhat "forward" but
are hardly honky.

Just for comparison, I tend to dislike Tannoy low end series and and I
absolutely hate Genelec 1029 although I suspect I might like the 1040's,

Well, the Genelec 1029 isn't anything to get excited about, but your
dislike of the Tannoy low end further suggests that you have listening
environment problems. No speaker will fix that.

coreybenson wrote:
Mackie HR824's. Their bottom end doesn't sound "real" to me, and the
mids bark at me. Some people like them, some people don't... I agree
with Traci on this one.

The mids are aggressive. Maybe even honky. I don't like some of the
things the Mackies do there. But the low end should not be woofy and out
of control.

While I agree Traci's room is probably PART of the problem, sometimes
you have no choice but to live with that which you're dealt. Throwing
away the idea that something else on the market might sound better in
Traci's room is of limited value... there are far too many options in
monitoring these days to remain narrowmindedly addicted to a particular
set of speakers.

Yes, but if the low end problems are from the room, you gotta address them
before you look at anything else. Until you get the room problems fixed,
you can't audition monitors properly to know what models you want!
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

coreybenson wrote:

While I agree Traci's room is probably PART of the problem, sometimes
you have no choice but to live with that which you're dealt.

The way to do this is to learn what good recordings sound like in your
less than ideal monitoring environment. You might not like what you
hear, but once you learn that this is what makes a "normal" recording
sound normal, you'll stop trying to compensate in your mixing and
you'll end up making recordings that work, How do you think so many
people managed to make decent sounding recordings monitoring on Yamaha
NS-10s in the 1980s?

Throwing
away the idea that something else on the market might sound better in
Traci's room is of limited value... there are far too many options in
monitoring these days to remain narrowmindedly addicted to a particular
set of speakers.

Sure. You can buy a speaker that's deficient in response where your
room is emphasizing problems. Perhaps you can find two wrongs that make
a right in this circumstance. Do you really want to do that?

I HATE the cheaper Tannoy speakers. Blech! If you've ever heard a
good set of audiophile speakers, the Tannoys sound like garbage.

Audiophile speakers are not usually considered good monitors for
recording, though really, really good ones ($10K and up) are sometimes
used as reference monitors in a mastering suite.

I think you misread Traci's comment about low-end, Mike. I think Traci
was talking about the lower LINES of the overall Tannoy line, NOT the
low-end coming OUT of the Tannoy speakers.

That's the trouble with not being specific. If he said he didn't care
for the low end on the PBM-8s, I'd agree with them. It's bloated. But
Tannoy hasn't made that model (for good reason) for many years.

Unless you've had a room designed from the ground up, it's tough to
overcome some environmental issues. We tried any number of speakers in
our room before we decided to go with the JBL LSR6325P's married to a
Focal 10" sub. Does our room sound perfect? Nope. Do the JBL's sound
better than anything else we tried in there? Yup. And everyone who's
been in our TINY little control room agrees.

Well, you did a sensable thing - you found a set of speakers that work
for you. Perhaps what's making them work isn't the overall accuracy (or
inaccuracy) of frequency response, but rather the radiation pattern -
perhaps they're not exciting troublesome modes as much as another
speaker. This is different than the free field response of a speaker,
which is something that you can actually compare between speakers
independent of the room. So, yes, you can partially compensate for room
problems by finding a spearker that's a good match. But you may not
like that speaker if you put it in another room. And if (which you
didn't do) you make your choice based on what you hear in a showroom,
all bets are off.

In a good room, you have more opportunity to hear what the speakers are
actually doing. In a poor room, you really don't know what the speaker
is doing (even though you might be fairly confident in what you hear)
so it's not fair to discredit a well designed spearker because it
doesn't work well in your room - nor to praise a speaker that may not
sound good in a different room. JBL makes plenty of good speakers, and
if that's what worked best for you, great. It's just that it's
important to understand that the room is an important part of the
listening chain, just as a mic preamp is an important part of the
recording chain.