Monitoring question

Can anyone offer me their advice. I recently bought a cheap but very nice pair of monitoring speakers, JBL control 1s, down from £120 to £50 (thanks richer sounds)

After using crappy hi-fi speakers for years, I was amazed at the sound of them, hearing subtle detail in raw synth noises that I had never noticed etc.



Then I fired up tunes that were a few months old and they all sounded much better than before.

Now here's where I am confused. I recorded one track a while back, and while it was an OK recording, it sounded weak when I tried it on a couple of other systems; the kick was more of a pop and the synths sounded a bit weak.

However when i ran this mix through my new speakers it sounded pretty damn good and chunky. Here's where I'm confused. Now obviously I have purchased the cheapest thing I can get away with, and don't expect them to be professional, just decent. And they are. And I assume they are 'flat' as well, as they are described as monitor speakers.

So why did the tune which sounded weedy before sound nice and chunky through these JBLs? I thought they weren't going to 'colour' the sound...

What should I trust, them, crappy hi-fi or what? I know it's probably a mixture of both, but if anyone can kindly shed any light on this it would be great.

Cheers

this is exactly why people use decent monitors, you need a monitoring system you can trust.
Monitoring system includes your room to! Between every parallel surface in your room you get whats known as a standing wave (several actually), to cut a long story short, standing waves either attenuate or accentuate frequencies (usually low end, larger wave lengths). Just by walking around your room and listening to the changes in level of the bass in your mixes will demonstrate this.
Also reflections from near by walls will cause frequencies to attenuate or accentuate.
You'll probably find that sorting out your speaker placement and your room will do more for your sound than more expensive monitors.

I do think that decent monitors are important tho.

You also mentioned you assume they are flat because they are monitors.
This is not the case it is impossible to get monitors completely flat, some are flatter than others but all of them will some descrepencies to their frequency response.

thanks Dos. I am an amateur and do it for fun, so I just want to get the best out of what I've got, adjusting my room sounds like a good idea.

Need to get em up on their brackets as well.

Cheers

that's a nice deal on them! i'm lookin to get a pair Tannoy Active Reveals at end of the month i might check those JBL's too

acidsid wrote:
After using crappy hi-fi speakers for years, I was amazed at the sound of them, hearing subtle detail in raw synth noises that I had never noticed etc.

What model of HI FI speakers where you using?

Yeah, you can't fault richer sounds. Friendly, and don't seem to be able to sell something without giving you a freebie, in this case speaker cable.

These JBLs sound really really nice.

maybe too nice.

I bought some monitors (Alesis Monitor 2's) and they are nice. Non powered, but I like em. There are many decent speakers that you can get, but I would advise you to use whatever you have. I reference my music through my cd recorder. I simply arm the recorder and listen through my headphones. This is the final destination for my mix, so whatever I hear on the headphones will be in the mix. Often, I would trust my monitors, and assume the bass was tight, or thhe faint shaker was loud enough because that's what my speakers were telling me. I'd burn the cd and to my surprise, the bass wasn't loud enough. If your not spending big bux on proven monitors, then you may as well buy something that sounds good and costs less. This is also the reason why many known underground producers still use the speakers from their old hi-fi units. Even some good computer moniters can do what you need them to do. If you computer speakers can sound good when you play a cd, then there's no reason why your music shouldn't.

. ..dETROiT_.. .313. ((._CREAM.OF.BEATS!_.(_..

Nice trax man.

Love the D sound... techno mostly...

It's somewhere I really want to go to.

Great bleeps in Masterbation Intermission