Recording - September 2013 - 17

exciting without boosting high frequency or low frequency.
But the term “flat” or “neutral” has
to take the room into account. The
most apparent problem is in the low
end, where the room is in control. You
can take the same speaker and put it
in two different places in the room, or
sit and listen in two places in the
room, and you will get a very different
impression of the low end. That’s not
the speaker’s fault... it’s the speaker in
the room. And the only way to tame
that is either to properly design the
room, or to use equalization.
When I say “design the room”, I am
talking about a purpose-built room,
which can involve a lot of cost and a lot
of real estate. There are talented people who design for these issues. But
you’re never going to tame lower frequencies by hanging stuff on a wall! A
50 Hz wave has a 20 foot wavelength.
Even with 4 inches of fiberglass, the
low end of the absorption is at 250 Hz.
So that’s not going to be effective in
taming the effect of low-frequency resonance common in small rooms.
The bottom line is, you either build
a room that tames those problems, or
you pick the spot in the room where
you’re going to be, and you eq out the
portion of the signal that excites the
resonance in the room that’s audible
where you’re sitting.
So that’s the low end. But in the
midrange and the high frequencies,
the speaker must be well behaved. In
that range you don’t eq; if it’s not
right, it’s a speaker problem. If you
find that you’re consistently pulling
out 3 kHz in the mix, for instance, it’s
not the room, it’s the speaker.

Monitoring For The
Neophyte
Let’s leverage a little bit of your background in talking to the reader who
for the first time is looking at his room
and saying, “You know, I’ve been messing around on my laptop with a pair of
headphones, but now that I’m starting
to mike a drum kit, now that I’m starting to work with singers, with guitars... I need to have speakers up, I
need to be able to hear what I’m
doing.” Any thoughts about how to
start, where to invest your time and
money, what to avoid?
First, let’s note that creativity and
passion go a long, long way toward
making something that people want to
hear. So if you’ve got that and you’ve
got a clean signal path, whether it’s a
$100 computer interface or whatever...
at the end of the day it doesn’t matter
how much gear you have if your mixes
RECORDING September 2013

17

are compromised by the lack of a neutral reference monitor system. It is
essential to get your monitoring situation right.
The essential ingredient is a pair of
speakers in a room that, together, tell
you the truth—that would mean a pair
of speakers that would sound neutral
in your room. Get the best speakers
you can afford, do your homework. At
JBL we work hard to ensure that what
you hear in your room is accurate, and
we offer great monitors at a wide
range of price points. So regardless of
your budget you can have an accurate
reference in your room.
When you set your new speakers up,
listen to a broad range of material

you’ve heard in a broad range of environments, material with which you are
very familiar, and notice how they
sound on your set of speakers in your
room. What you want to do is to find a
placement for those speakers that
causes music that you know and love
and understand to sound the way you
would expect it to. If you’re new to this,
listen to records that everybody
(including you) likes to hear.
You’re going to find that as you
change placement, the most audible
changes will be down in the low-frequency area. To the extent that the
lows sound “right” or “not right”,
everything else in the mix will sound
“right” or “not right,” because it’s a
http://www.gracedesign.com
Recording - September 2013

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