I hear so much nonsense about monitors that I decided to comment on the state of common "wisdom" with regards to what matters with monitors and what doesn't.
What exactly are we talking about?
Monitors are speakers, pretty much like any other speakers except they are supposed to be very useful for allowing a recording technician to know that what they're hearing isn't being changed by the monitors to sound like anything other than what the playback material actually is. This is important because every decision in recording is affected by the monitoring system.
Whenever you want to know if the mic placement is right for example, it's not enough to go into the tracking space and listen, because you need to know what the mic hears, not what you hear from where you might be standing. So what do you do? You go in the control room and listen through the monitors and make adjustments accordingly. Those kinds of decisions abound when you are recording from the tweaking and tuning of source instruments to the sound of preamplifiers and other gear. Anything you track you'll have to listen through the monitors to know how it's going to sound recorded. That's a lot of responsibility for your speakers. Imagine if they aren't providing you accurate information. It could be very detrimental to your results.
So what does a "good" or "accurate" monitoring system sound like? The answer is actually pretty simple: It sounds as if you're not hearing any speakers at all but only live performers right in the room with you. That's it. That's also a tall order because there is a lot of sonic information that is passed to your ears when you're hearing a live performance. Currently no speaker design is good enough to give all of that information to the listener. But the best designs come very close to reproducing a live performance sound and feel, and it's important to have both.
Our relationship with sound
You might be thinking that "feel" has nothing to do with sound but actually it has quite a bit to do with it. Think of the times when you've been in the room near a live drummer playing their drum kit. Remember when they played the kick drum and how not only could you hear the sound of the drum but you could actually feel it's impact deep in your center. Remember the snare drum and how whenever it was struck you could feel it crack inside of your skull. This isn't just loud playing. It's all kinds of different information that is hitting your ears and body and creating the experience of an actual sonic event.
It's that information that allows us as listeners to determine where exactly a sound is emanating from, what exactly it is, it's tone, texture and it's relevance to our place in the moment. Sound is a very complicated and deep matter with humans and consequently we are very good at hearing and unconsciously interpreting subtle information about sound. It's actually a set of survival abilities that have developed from eons of evolution. Now we are so used to hearing things and instinctively knowing about the sound of things that we take it for granted. But monitor designers can't afford to take such aspects of our relationship with sound for granted if they want to design speakers that are worth using as a reference...(to be continued)
Check back for part 2 when I talk about the most common types of "reference monitors" sold and how good or bad they really might be.
