Some Free Advice From Mike Senior

[jaysoul]

Thanks a lot for posting these 10 busted mixing myths. Some great tips in there.
One thing I don't understand is about the monitors.

When you've not got much money to buy monitors for mixing, a flat frequency response is much less critical than good time-domain response. Indeed, the two most celebrated mixing speakers of all time, the Yamaha NS10 and the Auratone 5C Super Sound Cube, both have extremely uneven frequency-response plots, but excellent time-domain performance.

What is time/domain positioning?

[mojobone]

Simply put, time-domain response is about how quickly an amp/speaker combo can track fast transients; it corresponds to an amplifier's slew rate and how well a speaker's voice coil(s) can damp overshoot. A third consideration is the amplifier's reserve power; if there's not enough, you get an undesirable artifact known as 'latching', where the first of a series of say, kick drum hits ends up being louder than the rest, because the amp can't recover quickly enough from a forward stroke. Some drivers display this behavior, also. There's a bit more to it, since low frequencies travel more slowly than highs, both through air and in circuits, but basically these anomalies cause transients to smear and become indistinct, making accurate decay and level judgments more difficult.

[elser]

I never thought a guy in a cowboy hat could be that smart.

[Russell Landwehr]

Simply put, time-domain response is about how quickly an amp/speaker combo can track fast transients; it corresponds to an amplifier's slew rate and how well a speaker's voice coil(s) can damp overshoot. A third consideration is the amplifier's reserve power; if there's not enough, you get an undesirable artifact known as 'latching', where the first of a series of say, kick drum hits ends up being louder than the rest, because the amp can't recover quickly enough from a forward stroke. Some drivers display this behavior, also. There's a bit more to it, since low frequencies travel more slowly than highs, both through air and in circuits, but basically these anomalies cause transients to smear and become indistinct, making accurate decay and level judgments more difficult.

In other words... From what I understand, (and I keep Mike's book on hand)... sometimes frequencies keep on going (or don't even start) and it makes you think there is more (or less) of that frequency than there really is.... and you DON'T want to mix to that bit of misinformation.

[jaysoul]

Thanks mojobone and Russel for helping me understand. Have been around for a bit but was not familiar with this.

Followup question: is there any info about this in monitors' specs?

best
Jay

[jdhogg]

its in a waterfall plot

have a look here

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep08/a ... hans10.htm

if you check out the freq response you can see why they are used - quite flat at the bottom end so good for getting a good bass/mid balance and why some dont like them i.e. harsh and lumpy as you go higher.

Personally ns10s are good for setting your bass to match a typical consumer speaker but thats about it...the top end always put me off.

[Russell Landwehr]

What that waterfall plot on the NS10 shows, is that it hangs on to 2k and 3k bit, and the stuff below 300 a bit more.

The thing is, with the 5ms that are shown for the NS10, that's a good waterfall plot. Mike Senior also puts the Auratone 5C as a good one too.

Nearly all monitors will hang on to some low frequencies. That's just the way it is.

Other speakers that don't fare so well will hang on to some midrange frequencies for 100ms. Now THAT's bad.

This article has a lot of waterfall plots for several speakers: http://www.soundonsound.com/pdfs/ns10m.pdf

[mojobone]

I never thought a guy in a cowboy hat could be that smart.

Well, it does automatically deduct ten IQ points, when I put it on, and if I also pick up a Les Paul plugged into a Marshall stack, that's minus another twenty, but I find it helpful for coming up with big, dumb riffs.

[6bq9]

@mojobone, just don't wear the hat without the boots.

[mojobone]

Thanks mojobone and Russel for helping me understand. Have been around for a bit but was not familiar with this.

Followup question: is there any info about this in monitors' specs?

best
Jay

Most modern studio monitors are biamped, with a separate amplifier for each driver, where an active or passive crossover splits the full range signal to feed each amp. (this is done because high frequencies require less amplifier grunt, than lows, and amplifying them separately produces less distortion/smearing of transients) Keeping the amps close to the drivers reduces line loss and induced hum, providing a cleaner signal, but in terms of the specs that are provided, manufacturers back in the old days were a little more forthcoming. When I started in the business, you knew a lot more about the amp because there was one per channel and only the crossover was built into the speaker. (a generation earlier, there were no crossovers and all amps and all speakers were full-range)

The upshot of this historic progression is that you'll have to pay very close attention to specs to learn anything about a built-in monitor amplifier's slew rate. (the speed with which it reacts to incoming signals, sometimes referred to as rise time) The picture is a bit more complicated though, because of the inverse square law and the afore-mentioned power relationship between high and low frequencies and other factors, such as impedance, resistance and capacitance, but slew rate is the basic measurement of an amplifier's speed, and speed corresponds to efficient handling of fast transients, which are found at the front end of any note on any instrument; they provide the punch or impact of the note, and various forms of compression tend to reduce it.

Aside from these purely electronic considerations that affect a monitor's response speed, (and I've skipped over a few, like capacitors, which are a kind of battery for an amp's reserve power, and transformers, which can magnetically slow the amp's response with the effect of rounding off important transients, and in the case of tube amplifiers, a rectifier tube also slows an amp's rise time, inducing additional "sag") there are also mechanical and magnetic considerations related to the speaker's construction, as well as the ambient air pressure and temperature that the drivers are working against. (your monitors are faster and more accurate, if it's cold, and you're in Denver)
Uh.....I hope that helps.