Recording - March 2018 - 26

MAX OUT
YOUR
help you avoid overly-EQing all your
mixes to get a certain tonal balance your
chosen speakers lack.

The low end

The low end of the frequency scale-
the bass-is often the area that's most
likely to trip up operators of small studios.
It's not only the speakers' low end
response that can be problematic; the
room itself is typically a major factor in
low-end monitoring issues, as I'll get into
in the second half of this article. But the
speakers' actual low-end response is
always a major consideration. In a perfect
(studio) world, there'd be enough money
and enough room to buy and (optimally)
install large, full-range monitors capable
of shaking the floorboards, but in the real
world bass response is often where the
biggest compromise has to made.
Low-frequency response in any speaker
is a tradeoff between three physical factors
(not to mention cost)-size, level, and
bass extension. You can't have all three-
conveniently small size, loud playback
capability, and deep bass response. A
speaker that's small and loud will need to
sacrifice low end for volume; small size
with deep bass will sacrifice volume/power

MONITORING

handling; and loud playback plus deep
bass will require a bigger box.
Most typically, size limitations in
smaller studios mean smaller boxes, with
an accompanying loss of bass extension.
Now, keep in mind that this doesn't mean
a smaller speaker will have poor bass
and tinny sound-a good design should
still have enough low end to balance out
the mids and highs. What it will lack is
not overall bass, but bass extension-
response down to the lowest octave. The
bass range typically extends from around
200 Hz or so down to 40 Hz, or even
to 30 Hz. Most musical fundamentals are
above 40 Hz, but post-production FX
(impacts, explosions) can easily extend
lower. Unsurprisingly, many smaller studio
monitors don't provide that depth.
Typical smaller monitors come with
5", 6", and 8" woofers (or thereabouts). An 8" design should be able to
provide bass extension down to around
40-something Hz without too much falloff
or too large a cabinet, but smaller 6"
and 5" models may roll off closer to
around 50-60 Hz or so. Even smaller
3"- 4" speakers may roll off below 80
Hz, but these are really designed to be
used with subwoofers.

The phantom
fundamental

Still, 5" and 6" designs are very common.
It's important to remember that fundamental
frequencies that fall in the lowest octave
will still be perceived even with speakers
that don't actually reproduce that octave,
thanks to the psychoacoustic phenomenon
of the phantom fundamental.
If a low note, like, say, low E on a bass
guitar (41 Hz fundamental) is played on
a small (5") speaker that rolls off the lows
around 60-something Hz, a listener will
still hear the 2nd/3rd/4th/5th/etc
harmonics that make up that sound-since
the harmonics are multiples of the (41 Hz)
fundamental frequency, those harmonics
will all start and finish their cycles together
at a rate of 41 cycles/second-41 Hz.
Thanks to our psychoacoustic perception
of complex sound waves, human hearing
perceives the missing frequency-and
therefore the correct fundamental pitch-
of 41 Hz (low E) even though the actual
fundamental frequency is too low to be
reproduced strongly by that small speaker.
The bass tone is thinner, of course, but
the note is there, and if the speaker's overall
response is well-balanced, with enough
even low-end response in the 60-200 Hz
range, that speaker can still be perfectly
useful for critical monitoring purposes-as
long as the user is aware of its limitations
and doesn't attempt to EQ things to try
to make it sound like a larger cabinet.
If he gets to know what most recordings
should sound like with that more limited
bass extension, then he could have a
well-balanced small speaker with a suitably
flat response for monitoring purposes.

Know your monitors

FIGURE 1. The red circles show regions of bass and treble "hype"
in hi-fi speakers vs. a flatter response in studio monitors.
26

RECORDING March 2018

And that's a key aspect of working with
studio monitors-the engineer/mixer needs
to get to know the sound of their monitors
well-to know what most commerciallyproduced/mixed/mastered music in the
appropriate genre(s) sounds like on those
speakers, and develop an internal reference
based on that response, rather than on
some idealized response that could only
be achieved with massive speakers and
subwoofers (to that end, frequent A/Bing
of current mixes with multiple selected
reference tracks can be very helpful).
That's how so many successful mixes were
made on the old Yamaha NS-10 speakers,
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - March 2018
