Listen on good speakers too, if you can

After yesterday’s post, our dear friend JT replied to me to ask:

This begs the question: why even pay for expensive monitors?

It's a valid question! The guy from Tame Impala famously mixes all his stuff on a pair of old stereo speakers. Which is absolutely a reasonable thing to do; there are no wrong answers as long as you’re getting good results. So there's definitely precedent for not mixing on fancy speakers.

That said, here are four reasons to get yourself some good monitors, if you’re able:

1. Transient response. For me, this is pretty key, given that I make finished things. I can literally hear things on these speakers — little noises and whatnot — attacks of things — that I can't hear *in headphones*, because the transient response of the headphone drivers isn't fast enough to reproduce them. So on headphones, my NS-10s, my Auratone, etc, it's like these details don't exist. I can literally only hear them on the Focals.

2. The detail in the midrange. The midrange is where a mix is made or broken — it's where all the emotional nuance lives. And the worse the speaker, the worse the midrange.

3. The interplay between the low-frequency driver and the high-frequency driver. There are a couple of significant things that can go wrong here, and that does on less expensive speakers:

3a: The crossover (the frequency at which the sound stops coming from the low speaker and starts coming from the high speaker). At what frequency is the crossover placed, and how accurately is that transition managed? In cheap speakers, you can have a gap in the sound that you won't even know is there. And you can’t mix what you can’t hear.

3b: Time-domain interactions. This is a complex topic, but suffice to say that if the sound coming out of the two drivers doesn't interact in a cohesive way, you can get frequency cancellations in the sound you’re hearing. In the worst-case scenarios, these cancellations can move around in the frequency domain depending on where your head is in relation to the speakers, like a moving target of inaccurate sound. (This is actually something the Auratone is amazing for, because it only has one speaker!)

4. Soundstage. Nice monitors have a soundstage that cheap monitors don’t. And if you can’t hear the soundstage, you can’t precisely place things on it, full stop. I didn’t even understand that 3D mixing was a thing one could do until I got my Focals.

So, listen to all the speakers — but, also, if you’re serious about the work and good at it, get yourself the best speakers you can afford. Your work will improve as a result.

Step by step — jamie