Recording - September 2013 - 20

The History And Mystery
Of Monitoring
Simply because it can be placed differently than your mids and your highs?
Yes, and crossed over properly—
some subs simply aren’t well designed
with respect to bass management, and
they may refuse to integrate nicely
with your system.
What about the user who wants to
impress clients with his pumping bass?
I’ll be honest... the objective has
always been that your room should
be a reference that you can trust in
creating material that’s going to be
heard outside your room. The trend
toward creating huge low frequency
in the control room really baffles me;
I don’t have any understanding of
how you can listen to augmented lowfrequency content in the control
room and yet know that what you’re
going to produce is going to sound
right on the outside... unless you just
say, “We’re going to have a party in
the control room, it’s gonna sound
great, we’re gonna have a lot of fun...
and then I’m going to give this to the
mastering engineer and he’s got my
back.” But given the extent that
you’re marrying a whole bunch of
sounds onto a 2-channel mix, there’s
only so much a mastering engineer
can do! You can’t go back and attenuate the bass or the low synth without
attenuating everything else down
there.

You can use a huge sub to check
things like how a mix might sound in
a club, where bass is frequently augmented, but we really regard the role
of the sub in the studio as bass extension, cleaning up problems in the bass
caused by the room, or in a surround
mix, as the LFE channel....
Low Frequency Effects... for movie
earthquakes, explosions, and the like.
Yes, which doesn’t have anything to
do with bass management or extension of your main speakers. Now, people have come to us and we’ve provided products that offer that tremendous low end for production of certain genres. We can do it, but...
But it doesn’t necessarily translate to
the best possible mix?
You’ve got to know what you’re hearing! And some people who work that
way do know their rooms... they know
when the room lights up in a certain
way that they’re there... but I think
they also have really good gatekeepers—mastering talent—in the path
between that mix and the market!

that fills the room... what you hear
from outside the room if you’re listening through a doorway should be
very neutral. The M2 is that on
steroids. We’ve been doing it for a
long time, and we took it to the next
level in the M2.
And there’s a reason for it. We wanted to build a large speaker system
that would work in a broad range of
spaces. We wanted to provide a
detailed and dynamic listening experience to people working in homes,
studios, industrial parks... But to
date, large speakers, although they
can provide detail and output, don’t
play well in a large range of rooms.
Low-end aside, what we call the directivity of the speaker is not uniform.
You want to make sure that at the
crossover, the off-axis response—the
directivity—of the low- and high-frequency transducers will be closely
matched. The goal is neutral off-axis
response throughout the bandwidth.
And when you achieve that, the
speaker is going to work in a broad
range of rooms and is going to be
more accurate for someone mixing in
a room that’s not purpose-built,

JBL Monitors, Present
And Future
To wrap up, let’s take a moment to
talk a bit about how these topics
relate to present and future JBL speaker designs, just as a nod to your current line of work.
Our latest flagship speaker, the M2,
is our latest expression of what we
call excellent power response. Power
response is the character of the sound

The new technologies premiered in JBL’s M2 Master Reference Monitors are now available in the new LSR305 and LSR308 speakers.
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RECORDING September 2013

Recording - September 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - September 2013