recommendations wanted

alfa beta

simple query here - I hope!

Within the net few days I want to go out/online and buy two things: a pair of headphones and a pair of monitors.

For these two things I want to spend a total of about 500 squid.

And here's what I want my investment to deliver - the ability to hear a mix in the following terms: if it sounds good on my new headphones and monitors it'll sound as good as it can on anything from laptop speakers, to car stereo's, to ****ty little mono kitchen radios, to down-the-club-woofer-heaven to whatever the hell people listen to music on these days.

I spose in a nutshell I'm looking for a beautifully neutral monitoring device for 500 quid.

Recommendations appreciated.

(BTW - total amateur here, messing around with Logic and recording stuff that sounds like it's been influenced by the 80's just a bit too much...!)

seannash

Yamaha hs50s for the monitors,definetly

http://www.thomann.de/ie/yamaha_hs50m.htm?sid=b59bb3395a80732db1e1f84f99f59716

I'll let the lads throw out headphone suggestions as i only use a ****ty pair of sennheisser earbuds that cost me 15 euro

Rockshamrover

ATH M50's for headphones.

Hayte

alfa beta wrote:

I spose in a nutshell I'm looking for a beautifully neutral monitoring device for 500 quid.

This doesn't exist at any price. It may be true (within a limited frequency range, +/- x dB) of a speaker playing pink noise in a room with perfectly controlled acoustics and captured by a calibration microphone, but this probably isn't your room, your songs ain't pink noise and you ain't using calibration mics. The resulting FFT can be weighted until its flat in the middle to a tolerance of +/- 1dB and you can disregard the non-linearity at the extremes of human hearing by arbitrarily limiting the measurement to say "flat between 100hz and 10khz".

There is no industry standard weighting/frequency range/tolerance and the test methodology, environment and equipment is rarely, if ever stated and probably isn't constant. In short, "flat frequency" and "neutral" are the new "whiter than whites". Its only useful for marketing purposes and doesn't tell you anything you need to know about the speaker. This also applies to microphones in some measure, since they are essentially very small speakers in reverse.

What most people do is try to use whatever fit for purpose speakers they have available or can afford, at the correct distance, in the biggest and least cluttered room that is available. Some issues beyond that can be alleviated with acoustic treatment of the room. If the room is not designed with acoustics in mind then this will be anywhere from an uphill battle to an impossible battle, so at some point, it makes more sense to move your studio.

After that you just use those speakers until you get used to them. Every now and then you check for mono compatibility by summing the output of the stereo master bus to mono in case the integrity of the mix collapses. If it does, then bits of it are going to disappear on the radio. Most people also check their mixes on their ipod/mp3 player, on their car soundsystem or wherever because they all sound different and they all give you a different "angle" of the song.

At the end of the day, its still just a balancing act and its part of the art of mixing. If you understand how people listen, then its easier to make informed decisions about mixing. This is kind of an impossible thing to do because people have diverse interests, are more or less receptive to certain sounds/ideas and are not perfectly rational. You can however do enough to satisfy yourself, which is half the battle.

You still need to ABX on multiple soundsystems and there is no cheap, easy way out unfortunately, far from the myths often perpetuated around NS10 (which are pretty average speakers by any measure).

condra

I vote:

Sony MDR-7506 headphones

HS50s are very good in their price range, and you could add a sub later if you needed to, or you could just go straight for a pair of hs80m.

...or spend all your money on monitors now and buy proper headphones later...

Standard advice is always to get the best monitors you can't afford! You won't regret it.

Feeling fruity? Adam A7...

Baggio...

I'm pretty happy with my sennheiser hd 650s.