ABSTRACT
That said, when choosing the stereo loudspeakers that will fulfill these duties in all but the most constrained studios, there’s a lot you can do to maximize your value for money. First off, furniture-rattling volume levels aren’t tremendously important for mixing purposes, despite what you might guess from seeing pics of the dishwasher-sized beasts mounted into the walls of famous control rooms-most mix engineers use those speakers mainly for parting the visiting A&R guy’s hair! “I use nearfields almost exclusively,” says Chuck Ainlay, “because there just aren’t many situations where the main monitors sound all that good. The mains in most studios are intended primarily for hyping the clients and playing real loud.”1 “I don’t use the big monitors in studios for anything,” says Nigel Godrich, “because they don’t really relate to anything.”2 You’ll get a more revealing studio tool at a given price point if you go for something where the designers have spent their budget on audio quality rather than sheer power. As it happens, the most high-profile mix engineers actually rely almost exclusively on smaller speakers set up within a couple of meters of their mix position (commonly referred to as nearfield monitors). If you sensibly follow their example in your own studio, you shouldn’t need gargantuan speaker cones and rocket-powered amplifiers, even if you fancy making your ears water.
