Decent and affordable home monitoring setup

Question

Anyone have any good brands for some home monitoring speakers for a small budget? Looking at Bose, but otherwise, I'm for a blank?

Answer 1

Check out KRK Rokits. Good bang for yer buck.

_{(source: krksys.com)}

Answer 2

If Genelecs are in your price range you won't go far wrong at all.

Answer 3

Adam A7, or the new A7X, if they are in your budget. Check the dynaudio BM 5A too, same budget. You really need to listen and try them. Maybe you can ask a reseller to listen to some material that you know, and compare the sound of different speakers.

_{(source: adam-audio.com)}

Answer 4

Well, it depends what you mean by "small budget". I would go with a pair of small powered studio monitors, which would depend on the size of the area your are monitoring in (square footage, height, etc.)

Answer 5

Check out Blue Sky, Mackie, and Tannoy for relatively cheap, but decent setups. You do need to provide more info, like the size of your room...stereo or surround monitoring etc..

Answer 6

Hi! Well...in my opinion you don't have to underestimate how much a good couple of monitors important is. Budget is the first important thing: I wouldn't take KRK Rokits and Genelec. It would be better to find a couple of KRK V8. They are very good and they let you hear many things that other monitors use to hide. Genelec are very boomy and not accurate. They are very good for listening to music but not for work. Adam too are very good, but for what they give are too expensive. On the other hand you could look for a couple of passive monitor, but it depends about your budget and if you have to move frequently. Yamaha NS-10 are a good standard but in my opinion are absolutely overestimated. If you look patiently on e-bay for a couple of B&W 805 Matrix I can assure you that it's the best choice that you can make. They are celestial. What I must tell you is: buy used! Don't buy a new couple of monitor, beacuse you pay them too much and maybe in 6 months you decide to change them. Furthermore it's very important WHERE are you going to put your monitors. Even if you buy a couple of Zingali and you put them in a bad (acoustically) place they will sound as a couple of Ipod's speakers.

Hope I've been usefull

PS This is only my opinion, about speakers everyone has his own liking. If you can go to a store and try them with your own hears trying to understand by your self.

Answer 7

I'm with KRK side

Answer 8

There are definitely trends in what monitors are being used across town (Los Angeles) and the industry these days, mostly what is popular during the time of purchase. For example, when I was an intern at Danetracks almost every editing suite was using the Mackie HR824; they are extremely reasonably priced and translate exceptionally well, both on large format stage situations and television. The new HR824mk2 are another story, as it is said that they do not sound as good as there predecessors and I doubt the decision to purchase Mackies would be the same if these were the speakers available back at the original point of sale.

I believe at one point M&K speakers were favored at Skywalker Sound, but as M&K is in a production slump because of legal issues at the moment, Dynaudio seems to be the choice now. (You can see what looks like BM6's with Ben Burtt in the special features section of Wall-E)

The Genelecs are amazing speaker for one reason alone: They are nearly perfectly flat in response. GENELECS HAVE TO BE TUNED. Almost every other speaker in the market has some sort of curve to it, either making the product sound amazing or lousy. Genelec are an amazing speaker but can be to punchy or harsh if they are not tuned for the specific room they are installed in. There is a good reason why so many studios use Genelec on their stages...

Where I am currently working we have a JBL 5672 5.1 system for mixing features, a 2.1 M&K for music, and a small set of cheapo Yamaha's for TV emulation. They all sound amazing.

The biggest point of advice I can give is this: Find out what your peers/co-workers/clients are using and emulate their setup. If I was working for Danetracks I would get a set of Mackies. For Skywalker I would purchase Dynaudios. If I was mixing strictly Television I would probably get a small pair of Genelec 8020's or 8030's. At home I have a Blue Sky 5.1 Media Desk system that I purchased used for $850. A great set of speakers for basic editing and basic panning. In my opinion you should refrain from Bose, not because it is a bad speaker, but because no one uses them for professional audio editing in our industry, that I know of or have seen so far.

Hope my rant was useful... Nick

Answer 9

Monitors are very subjective and everyone will have their own opinion. Your best bet is to figure out exactly what your budget is and what speakers are available in that range. Look at sites like sweetwater.com or guitarcenter.com to see what is out there and get a good idea of price ranges.

Since you mention that you are looking for monitors on a "small budget" that leads me to believe that you basically just need something that will play back sound. In most cases, you do get what you pay for, so budget as much as you can. Otherwise, you will see yourself upgrading very soon.

I've owned 3 pairs of monitors in my career: Event 20/20's, because they were cheap and I needed something to get started. Then I upgraded to Mackie HR824's, because I became familiar/comfortable with them through many of the game studios I worked at. After 7 years with the Mackies, I just upgraded to JBL 6328P's, and it is a totally different world.

Once you have narrowed down your budget, and have a few models picked out, you could ask for people's opinions on the specific models. But, as a I said above, monitors are very subjective.

Answer 10

Three of the control rooms where I use to mix have installed Genelec 8050, 8020 and older 2029A. The last two ones are quite small so they may be cheap enough for a small budget. But I definitely wouldn´t recommend any of them. I wish I had Dynaudio BM6, but is not the case by now. One of this rooms have a pair of Yamaha NS10m so these are what I use when I mix there. I have a pair of Yamahas at home too.

If you don´t want to spend a lot of money JBL Control 1 could work. They are passive although there is and active version. I´ve used the passive ones at postproduction a few times and I see them as a medium quality reference, a step under the Yamahas.

I´ve used small active Fostex 6301 but they are not detailed at mids so wouldn´t be a choice for me.

If you want to mix with quality reference for a small amount headphones could be a solution too. For the price of a pair of medium quality speakers you could get some good cans: Beyer DT880, Sennheiser HD25...

Answer 11

Adam's A7, Genelec's 80xx and Dynaudio's BM5A are discussed in this thread on GearSlutz: http://www.gearslutz.com/board/high-end/154894-adam-a7-vs-genelec-8030a.html. Even though this is the music production section it seems the A7 are more popular...

I'm looking for them at the moment, it could be my 600 euros frenzy of the year :)