In these days I am looking a lot into getting new monitors. I’m making all my music on my Adam A7s (and the AKG K712 headphones) and I have pretty much switched entirely to using hardware only (Elektron OT, AR and DN) except for the mixing/mastering which is done in software. I aim to get very good at both mixing and mastering mainly electronic music. Currently no room treatment but I’d rather look into that once I have better monitors.
I get to try the Barefoot Footprints01 regularly now in my friends studio and they sound amazing with their clarity, great detail, wide dispersion and plenty of low end so I’d love to get much more of these qualities from my monitors and I feel that the A7s are really lacking in these.
I have even started to look into the Focal SM9s since I may as think big and get some truly great monitors if I decide to take a loan. Comments are welcome on these speakers.
Anyway, while I keep dreaming I’d like to know if you think I could actually do fine with the Adam A7s perhaps with a sub or if I may as well take that loan…
same advice! treat your room before you change monitors. the barefoots in an untreated room (depending on the size of your room) may make it more difficult to mix actually.
Looking forward to this thread building up as there is always some excellent sage like advice given here and sound treatment is something I’m interested in and would like to know more about
acoustic treatment is a bit of a dark art, I find :). but rules of thumb are:
do not place your speakers / mixing position in the middle of a room OR right against a wall OR in a corner. also if the room is rectangular, ideally you will place the speakers facing down the “longer” side of the room. a good mixing position is 1/3 into the room (ie 2/3 of the room behind the mixing engineer)
start with bass traps in all four (or ideally more) corners of the room. if you’re on a budget cover the four corners where the walls meet the floor, but ideally you also cover the four corners where the walls meet the ceiling. if you have some more to spend, cover the “folds” where the walls meet also. Bass is the big one to gain control over with acoustic treatment.
for the rest of the room, it really depends what you do in it. if you want to mix only, then a deader room (more treatment on walls and ceiling) makes sense. if you’re composing or even recording in it, I’m not a big fan of totally dead rooms. basically, a few panels on the wall behind the speakers and on the wall behind the mixing engineer are a good start. or panels behind speakers and diffusors behind mixing engineer. soft, thick surfaces will help swallow reflections. soa sofa in the room will help, a book shelf with books also (works like a diffusor :). carpets can also help as the floor is of course also a reflective surface (again good one when on a budget).
Speakers like the barefoot pack a punch, so if you use them in a small and/or untreated room, they can make it extremely difficult to get the bass under control. I’m not a huge fan of the Adams, but they are certainly good enough to do a decent mix. In the end, no monitor is perfect and as long as separation and stereo field is decent, once you learn the speakers you should be able to mix with them. but for that it’s necessary totale the room out of the equation
Great to read the many fine replies here this morning.
The thing is, the room is my living room so I have both my bed and the kitchen here. The room is a bit oddly shaped. I just made a vector drawing of my room since that’ll provide the most info.
So this is not a studio and definitely not the ideal environment but still I think I can mix reasonable well here. I use my AKG headphones often for cross-checking things and those provide a pretty good reference without the room. I never noticed any strong resonances here in front of my setup. If I bought a sub I’d set it pretty low just to be able to hear that low end so I don’t think it would get out of hand. But I haven’t tried yet. Not sure though if my money is best spend on this and if it’s worth it in this place. But it’s great that I now have access to my freinds studio which is well treated, so I can check and learn the differences.
I am considering moving but it’s hard to find anything bigger and better here unless it’s much more expensive.
Maybe it is better to wait with the high end monitors until I find a new place. I really must have my music setup or studio at my own place since I spend all my free time making music.
You will be fine, take the well put advice written above in mind, and do what you can, with what you have. There are many diy solutions which will give good results in a home studio environment! And don’t think bigger is better! I can personally recommend the Neumann KH80’s. never heard anything that clear before. The genelecs in similar size is the closest competitor in the price range. Stellar monitors, can’t recommend them enough. They only go do down to 50hz though, so to check the sub frequencies, go for good headphones that you trust. Sonar works have great software for correcting small deficiencies in many models.
Get some absorbers for the wall behind you when at your studio desk. If it’s a solid wall with some space to your right, put some there as well. If you mix at lower levels, which is recommended, the reflections should be a bit lesser problem as well. I think absorbers behind monitors are preferable too. Neumann are releasing a room correction DSP software for these monitors, although I’ve been waiting for this to be released as long as OB2 lol, but when this comes out you’ll have possibilities to EQ out some of the room modes as well! Hope any of this helps!
…a fuller room can already count as a treated one, somehow…first of all…clap ur hands where u use to mix…and see what kind of clash and accoustic response u get there…
barefoot monitoring seems to me a bit too much for that room situation u got there…
and before u u don’t call some decent room ur workspace only, any further detailed treatment does’nt make sense that much…
ur adams can do a not so bad job, really…conterchecking with decent headphones is always a good idea…and final checks on ordinary apple earbuds is a pretty good idea in fact…never forget how most of the world out there will consume ur sound end of the day…
getting low end just right is always the most common challenge…
using subs for this makes it even worse if u don’t do it properly for real…
in first place it’s only pushing ur personal good feel while listening there…but ur sound will never ever sound exactly as only u can experience and hear it there where u mixed it anyways…which is even the case if everything would be set up just perfect…
so be aware of the fact, once u take this road, it becomes a neverending story and the rabbithole gets only deeper and deeper…
so u might better keep focus on ur content and work with what u got there already…and sharpen ur skills this way further more…
but if u wanna go further anyway…
forget about bass traps for now…and find some tracks u like u can really say about, this one worked for real in a club or whereever u like to be sure ur stuff’s gonna work fine…
and start listen closely to this one and how it sounds in your mixing enviroment…
dry out ur mixing situation is always fast to do with some ordinary pyramid foam stuff placed above and behind ur speakers…but don’t overdo it…otherwise ur mixes end up too wet…
i found my personal happyness to all this, at least when it comes to nearfield monitoring, with neumann kh120…which even do an amazing job in different sourroundings if u place them properly…
and those would make defenitly a clear upgrade to ur adams…
but as ur already aware of, the room is always half of all sound…
Thanks for drawing up your room! The furniture such as your bed actually help to diffuse some of the frequencies. What‘s in the cupboard behind your mixing position? What sort of flooring in the room? And how high is the ceiling? I would still go for bass traps in the corners (maybe barring the one where the bed is) and as people have suggested a bit of treatment behind the speakers and maybe behind your mixing position…there‘s the off-the-shelf stuff which can get expensive or you can look for diy solutions - in Berlin for example there‘s a dude that sells treatment at a fraction of commercial prices and the materials he uses are still very good. There‘s always a guy like that around, just have to do some research
Remember that you can mix more accurately if you do it at reasonable levels (ie DON‘T turn the volume all the way up when mixing).
The advice to get some reference material and get to know it in your mixing environment is very good. If you learn your speakers and your room (and the bias they introduce) you can correct for that in your mixes. It‘s all about how the mix translates to other sound systems & listening environments. It‘s also important to remark that ALL speakers and ALL environments will introduce some form of bias and you will have to learn them, no matter how much money you spend (but a well treated environment will make it easier to hear and distinguish between the details :))
I think it is also important to win clarity over what it is that you are trying to achieve here: my impression is that you want more bass so that you can feed off the inspiration when COMPOSING. My personal feeling is, when composing it should sound good (to keep me going and keep me inspired), when MIXING it should sound accurate. You‘ll probably have to strike the balance between those. It sucks to have the feeling that the life is sucked out of your music as you are trying to make it…at the same time it sucks to take your awesome mix and play it at your friend‘s place just to notice there that the balance across frequencies is totally off/there‘s too much reverb/the lead is too loud etc…so yeah, balance…this thing is an art for a reason
Looking at your monitors and your headphones, both are somewhat weaker on the bass side (Especially the K712…I own them also and find them feable for bass although lots of people would disagree). Maybe you wanna look into another set of headphones for composition? I also own the Focal Spirit Professionals, got them used for €150 (they can be had for that frequently). They sound GREAT and help me groove in. Smaller investment than Barefoots and maybe it does the trick? Or you get a set of speakers (hifi/commercial) that you love listening to and switch between them as you work.
The other thing that impacts sound quality is ADDA conversion, what sort of interface/mixer are you using? When I got my UAD Apollo 8 (upgraded from a TC Electronic Konnekt) the sound opened up massively and all those amazing details sprung out of my cheap LSR305s…
Great advice there hausland!
The floor is a new bright wood floor. The ceiling is 2.55m high.
The cupboards has some books and other stuff - about half full.
My Audio Interface is the new UAD Arrow which should have fairly good converters.
Yeah I don’t mix at high levels at all.
My Adam A7s are the only speakers I have so they function as HIFI too I’m fine with that.
In general I get pretty good bass from my Elektron instruments so no lack of inspiration here. I just found that the Barefoots delivered a good deal more but it was their great detail and dispersion that struck me the most.
Are you sure about the K712s? They are reference so not sure they should have more bass…?
I haven’t tried any Focal headphones but have considered getting the beyerdynamic DT 1990 PRO on several occasions.
Hey man, great! So a carpet/rug will probably further help with the acoustics. Ceiling is OK, you could treat it but that would be the last thing I do. Books in the cupboard is great, if they are of different size that’s even better. That can work like a diffusor, so fill up that shelf with books and soft stuff lol.
Re the K712, they are reference alright, not suggesting they should have more bass, just saying that they don’t transmit that energy in the same way…I don’t find mine inspiring, but there are plenty of people who LOVE those so there you go the Focals I mentioned because they are closed-backs, have great separation and are maybe a little hyped in the bass register, so they are great for listening and feeling things (the composing part :)) but probably not so great for mixing. Ideally you don’t mix on your headphones anyway (just A/B on them).
Man the Barefoots are phenomenal speakers no doubt, I’m just thinking and feeling for your your wallet!!! They are EXPENSIVE. Worth it I’m sure, but if you get speakers like that you better have your room right otherwise you’re parking your ferrari on the street at night
+1 on the focal headphones, Have them myself. They are truly exceptional in mid and high range, very revealing, however, they are not at all representative in the lower regions (IMHO, happy to discuss!), so I would recommend open headphones that are known for accurate bass reproduction, I use sennheiser hd650 for that. And as pointed out earlier, always reference in lousy headphones/speakers later on, as this is how most people will listen for the first time.
just test your crap mixes on multiple playback systems and make adjustments using a eq on your master buss which will be compensating for a poor monitoring environment
so I have both my bed and the kitchen here. The room is a bit oddly shaped. I just made a vector drawing of my room since that’ll provide the most info.
I’m fine with that.