Recording - September 2013 - 18

It’s Not Just Boom
The History And Mystery
Of Monitoring Do you have any particular philosophy
balance that your ears are used to
hearing. You want to find a spot in the
room where your speakers, assuming
they are accurate to start with, are
reproducing the whole bandwidth in
a relatively neutral fashion.
So when you put up a record that
you know and love and suddenly it’s
very boomy to you, your next step is to
change the placement of the speakers
so that the low end that’s being exaggerated suddenly falls into place. You
can also experiment with moving your
listening position; both the placement
of the speakers and the placement of
the listener affect your perception of
the low frequencies.
That’s the single most constructive
thing... if you can place your speakers
in a room and find a spot for them,
and for yourself, where your reference
material sounds right to you, then
you’re in the ballpark!

or her system (the speaker and the
room) is translating properly!
It’s an iterative process: listen,
tweak placement, listen again, tweak
again. Sure we can do things like eq
later on, but before you ever touch
that eq... start with placement!
And it’s a process of trial and error.
Yeah. You take your mixes around,
and you listen in other places and on
other systems, and you find yourself
saying, “Wow, I thought this sounded
pretty good at my place... I’m not
hearing any bass out here! Hm! I must
be hearing too much bass at home...
let me see if I can find a better placement for my speakers.”
Here’s a very simple way to demonstrate this. Put up a bass tone, a sine
wave at 40 Hz or 50 Hz or 60 Hz, just in
one speaker, and then walk around the
room. Notice there are places in the

about adding a subwoofer? Perhaps
someone feels they’re just not hearing
enough bass, whether it’s the room or
the genre of music demanding it... any
words of advice or caution?
Sure! I come from an era when we
didn’t believe in subwoofers, because
we felt that all they did was produce
boom. But we have learned that when
done properly, a subwoofer not only
extends your low frequencies but can
actually fix problems in the low end
that you can’t otherwise.
It’s pretty simple. We just talked
about the placement of a speaker in a
room and its relationship to the quality of the low frequencies, right? Your
left and right speaker positions are
dictated, at least somewhat, by where
your work surface is, the shape of your
room, and so on—to the extent that
you have options to move them around
and play with placement, you should
do so, but we understand it’s not too

“Find a spot in the room where the speakers...
are reproducing the whole bandwidth
in a relatively neutral fashion.”
It took me a while to learn how
vitally important this was; I’d be working with a bass player in one room,
then we’d move to another room and
his bass would sound completely different! And I’d say, “What’d you do?”
and he’d say, “What do you mean,
what did I do?” “Is it a different
bass?” “No.” Do you need to change
your strings?” “No.” And all it would
be was just where the speakers were
placed, and what the speakers in the
room were telling me about the bass.
I started to become really diligent—
going into the room, the day before if
possible, so I wasn’t doing it during
the session, and finding a spot where I
felt the speakers were telling me what
I needed to hear in the low end, even
if it was a placement off to the side
rather than right on the console! On
the console, on stands, off to the side...
same speakers, good speakers, but
completely different results.
Start with a great speaker, get your
placement right, sit in the right place,
and make sure you know what you’re
hearing. The difference between
someone who’s just starting out and
someone who’s been doing this for
years is that the person who’s been
doing it for years has the evidence in
the market and on the radio that the
sound he or she is carving out on his
18

RECORDING September 2013

room where it sounds fine, but there are
other places in the room where the
amplitude of the tone doubles in level—
and places in the room where you can’t
even hear it! It disappears! It’s one of the
most fun and dramatic things you can
do if you’re not familiar with the interaction of the speaker and the room.
You haven’t moved the speaker, you
haven’t changed the program material... yet your listening position dictates whether you’re even going to
hear that frequency, or conversely if
you’re going to hear too much of it.
That’s a good test of the placement of
your speakers and where you listen.
Ideally you should be able to play
tones from 100 or 150 Hz on down, and
they should all be at the same amplitude to your ears where you’re sitting,
with none jumping out or vanishing.
If at that point you can hear one tone
that still jumps out, that’s a room mode,
a resonance in the room like what you
get when you blow across the open top
of a jug. The room has a tone and you’re
exciting it. That’s where eq can be very
handy, to filter out the portion of the signal that excites the problem frequency.
A better solution would be proper bass
trapping; there are standalone products
available that really work well in taming
bass issues, when specified by a knowledgeable consultant.

flexible. The left has to be on the left,
the right has to be on the right!
[laughs] And they have to be a certain
distance from your listening position...
and the positioning you have to live
with might be the absolute worst position in the room to produce bass!
You could be sitting in a “hole”
where there is simply no bass, or where
there are room modes that are out of
control. And if you can’t move those
speakers, the solution is to bass-manage! Stop sending those lows to those
speakers, and instead throw everything
below a certain frequency to a subwoofer and place the subwoofer where
it produces neutral-sounding lows.
Placed and crossed-over properly in a
good system, a sub is very transparent.
It should all sound like it’s coming from
your left and right speakers... and it
does, if it’s done right.
If you’re not hearing enough bass due
to room problems, using a sub can be
very helpful. We recommend a sub for
any size system, preferably one with
some tuning capability like JBL’s RMC
Room Mode Correction eq. You dial it
in, and it takes care of low-frequency
bumps. It can be a great solution, even if
you supposedly have “full range” speakers; you may be hearing not enough or
too much bass from them due to the
room, and a sub can benefit you.

Recording - September 2013

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