Looking for suggestions for studio monitors

[mojobone]

Not to rain on the NS10 parade, but unless you can mount them horizontally on the meter bridge of a large format console, you're unlikely to get the best out of them. While I'm at it, the new Auratones are said to have better frequency extension than the originals (and the same great phase response) and there's also nothing at all wrong with the Avantones, in either the active nor passive versions.

Really, the upshot is, you can learn to mix on just about anything, if you do a lot of critical listening to good reference material. I happen to agree with Mike Senior (and many others) about ported enclosures; trouble is, almost nobody makes sealed-cabinet monitors for anything under a thousand a pair, yet I notice there are plenty of folks with cheaper systems who manage to get an awful lot of work done. As to active vs passive speaker designs, they're all engineered to meet a price point, including the amps, regardless of whether they're mounted in the speakers. My personal preference is for active and bi-amped, because it's A: more efficient and B: fewer cables. And maybe C: someone who knows more than I about speaker design has matched the amps, the drivers, the crossover and the cabinet/waveguides.

[Len911]

Fwiw, I have Yamaha NS-10M Studios and a Yamaha P2100 amp.

I bought the monitors new and the amp used. I found the receipt for the amp, 1994! So that must have been the same year I bought the monitors.

For good or bad, I use headphones.

Looking through old receipts, I noticed that I bought the API gear through Westlake Audio. Small world,lol!

[cosmicdolphin]

Really, the upshot is, you can learn to mix on just about anything, if you do a lot of critical listening to good reference material. I happen to agree with Mike Senior (and many others) about ported enclosures; trouble is, almost nobody makes sealed-cabinet monitors for anything under a thousand a pair, yet I notice there are plenty of folks with cheaper systems who manage to get an awful lot of work done.

Big +1 on this...you can mix on virtually anything as long as you learn how it translates once it leaves your studio

I also think "If you can't hear it properly you can't mix it"....many people produce mixes that are coloured by their mix enviroment.

6 or 7 years ago I made my own acoustic treatment based on articles in Sound on Sound, and treated the room with the help of a special mic for measuring acoustics, some free analysis software and some guys on a forum who helped me interpret the results and suggested tweaks. One of these guys was Ethan Winer who owns a well known acoustic treatment company. Suffice to say after building my absorbers and buying a large box of Auralex foam and treating the bass in my little studio it is a pretty nuetral sounding place to mix in without spending crazy money ( though I did spend about half what my monitors cost )

Since then I've been pointed to this article which is quite a similar thing to what I did and recommend anyone take a look:-

http://www.mixedbymarcmozart.com/2014/1 ... tto-style/

After all that I still found some of my mix skills were not as good as I would like, so I hooked up with Mike Senior on & off over a couple of years ( at a cost BTW ) and he basically critiqued mixes that I'd done , pulled them apart in a very professional manner and advised me where I was going wrong...I should add that this was AFTER reading his book and getting some decent comments in a competition he judged. Then I sent him the remixes to see if I had improved it.

I must say that this mentoring/feedback was far more valuable than anything else for fixing my issues and when I finally sent him something that he said was "very close " to a commercial release I felt like I'd truly graduated!

For the record I have Adam A7s , an Avantone Mixcube ( read Mix Secrets for The Small Studio as to why this is a valuable tool ) and also a ghetto blaster type thing wired up to my audio interface that I can switch on as well as a decent pair of Sennheiser cans.

Each thing gives me a different perspective on the mix, and I do a lot of referencing as well with commercial tracks before , during and after the mix...Oh and referencing is free ! How cool is that?

Mark