Recording - April 2012 - 38

BY LORENZ RYCHNER

Pelonis Model 42 Stereo Monitors
Unusual concentric passive monitors + purpose-built amp = flexible, great sound
Chris Pelonis is a man with many missions. Studio musician, designer of studios, recording and mixing engineer, and designer of speakers that are, in his words, tools for critical listening. The M42 is the latest and smallest of his monitor designs. Three boxes, four amps The M42 stereo package includes the two speaker cabinets, a 1U rackmount chassis that contains four power amps, and the requisite cabling. The picture shows the unusual angular shape of the speakers, designed so they can easily be aimed up, down, or together for optimum placement. The elements are concentric—a 0.75" titanium tweeter sits inside a 4" multi-fiber pulp cone. A small port hole sits above the speakers. Around back you’ll find four binding posts—a positive/negative pair for each element, neatly labelled. On the back of the rackmount chassis the signals of the four amplifiers are available from the same kinds of binding posts, flanked by an IEEE socket for the (supplied) AC cord, and a pair of audio inputs accepting either XLR or 1/4" plugs. There is a switch for +4/–10 level adjustment. The front of the amp chassis has the on/off switch, a status LED, and a USB port. There is no volume control, the idea being that you handle that from your console or monitor control station. USB on monitors? The Pelonis website has software for user download, in separate Windows and Mac versions, that, once installed, gives the user access to the M42 system. First you install a Silicon Labs USB driver, then you run the CP Control app. Turns out that you need to boot your computer in 32-bit mode or it won’t “see” the amp. Chris Pelonis advised me to hold down the 3 and 2 keys while
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booting my new MacBook Pro—it’s as simple as that, but you have to know it... Once the software is running, you can customize settings for eq, gain levels, and signal delay. You can send your setting to the amp, listen and fine tune, either revert to your previous setting or save the new setting, both on the amp itself and also as a computer file for future recall. The eq section offers five bands. Each band can be left flat, or be altered at a selectable frequency, with a range from +3

setup. The CP Control screen also lets you mute individual or all speakers, and the large screen lets you see instantly what you’ve been up to. If you have spec’d out your room and you know for sure what its deficiencies are, this software gives you a chance to do acoustic room correction from within. In a surround system you might want to use it to goose the midrange in the center speaker where most of the dialog is supposed to happen, or to attenuate booming bass in rear speakers that have to sit too close to a corner. This adds up to nice flexibility. Placement and listening The M42 monitors are not magnetically shielded. They deserve to be set up away from gear that could interfere or suffer from interference— place them where you get the best sound from them, rather than where they can be crammed into a busy desktop setup most conveniently. Pay attention to avoiding reflective surfaces. Turn the monitors up to a reasonable level—don’t be shy just because they’re tiny, they can do the almost universally recommended monitor volume of 85 dB SPL easily, and then some. First impression: Generous dispersion. To this reviewer’s ears, the sound has no pin-point quality, but rather a wide soundfield with a room-filling quality that belies the size of these units. This first impression was immediately followed by the recognition that these speakers want to play with the big boys. They can make listening a joy while supplying the minute detail that could spoil said joy if it’s a flaw in one’s recording. I heard the kind of detail that you expect from a monitor rather than from just any good speaker.

dB to a drastic –18 dB, and with a variable Q (bandwidth) from 20 (very narrow) to 0.50 (very broad). Bands 1 and 5 have a third option, for shelving, where 1 becomes the low shelf and 5 the treble shelf, again with selectable frequency and by as much as +3 dB down to –18 dB. I concocted a rather unrealistic smiley curve with a silly notch in the middle, just for illustration purposes—see the screenshot. The gain for the speakers can be altered, to be the same for both (“linked”) or individually, with a range from +6 dB down to –60 dB, by half-dB increments in the critical range around zero dB, and by larger increments further down on the ladder. The delay can be used to compensate for sound-arrival discrepancies in a surround

Recording - April 2012

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