THE EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION OF THE STUDIO SPEAKER

Andy Jones looks at the latest self-calibrating monitors and software and discovers that your speakers will never be the same again…

It used to be that you’d get one set of monitors for your mixing and mastering, you’d get to know them and they’d be your studio partners for life. You’d pay a fortune for them and it was a well known rule that the flatter their frequency response, the better – honest was the best policy. How things have changed: nowadays the humble studio monitor has evolved far beyond those electricallyinduced plates that vibrate air particles. In real terms its price has fallen and as for its frequency response – well that’s up to you!

Just in the last decade the speaker itself has changed beyond recognition. Or if it hasn’t, it can do. Speakers can adapt to your room, they can make themselves ‘better’, or even turn themselves into other speakers. Sometimes you don’t even have to rely on one pair, as they can be several pairs! And the best part is that you don’t (always) have to spend four- or five-figure sums on them. Speakers have come of age. And they are about the only item in the world that seems to get getting better in terms of value for money. All hail the studio monitor. If it doesn’t save the world from economic ruin, it will save your mixes as well as your bank balance.

So what happened?

A mere decade ago I was advising that when it came to studio monitors, to allocate at least 40% (or more!) of your studio budget to getting a great set of monitors. These were (and still are) the most important piece of the signal chain. You could, I would say, spend a fortune on preamps, microphones, interfaces, cables and other studio gear, but if you listen to the end results through a pair of Coke cans, it will all be wasted.

While this point is still valid – speakers *are* the most important part of your signal chain – somewhere in the last decade, things changed in terms of cost versus technology. Expertise in acoustic design reached something of a peak, just when DSP technology advanced in speed and lowered in cost and the end result is that you can now get very decent studio monitors for *whisper* three figures.

And as the costs have fallen, so the technological innovations have risen and your speakers no longer just sit there passively doing their ‘thing’. Now they are intelligent! We’re not really talking ‘artificial intelligence’, thank goodness, although speakers do now seem to have minds of their own. Instead we’re talking about phrases like ‘self calibration’, ‘self adjusting’, or

‘frequency analysis’, all now commonplace terms when it comes to buying studio monitors.

Smart stuff

I first experienced self calibrating monitors through Genelec’s SAM (Smart Active Monitor) about five years ago and it’s an almost industry standard process that has led the way in speaker technology. Using the company’s GLM (Genelec Loudspeaker Manager) software, you connect your speakers up (in this case we were trialling The Ones SAM 8331 and 8341) along with a measuring microphone via a network connector. Within the software you ‘place’ your speakers left and right with a subwoofer if you have one (shown above). Back in the real world, place the supplied microphone in front of the speakers in a central ‘listening’ position at head height.

Once you have entered your room dimensions you can start the speaker calibration test, a surprisingly easy process. After five seconds the speakers spit out a series of sweeps and peeps. By analysing what they get back from the microphone, they can tell how well (or in my case how badly) the room you have them placed in is performing. The microphone picks up the reflections and works out the room specs in terms of frequency peaks and troughs. The speakers use this data and then ‘self adjust’ their DSP-driven filter responses, accounting for how your room affects the overall response. If you have peaks in the bass region, for example, the speakers counter this by notching the filters down in those regions. You can get a detailed frequency response curve of your room (top right). The red line is the actual response of the room and you can see the peaks; the blue is the counter filter action made by the GLM process and the resulting green line is the flat response result.

In practice, the mic measurement calibration is a beautiful process and one that is quite easy to wrap your head around: you end up mixing with a flatter frequency response – that green ‘target’ line – so your mixes should translate better to other playback systems; it’s as simple as that.

Of course you could argue that the process is really just papering over the real problem which is the acoustic issues in your room, but for those of us not interested (or able) to make the necessary acoustic adjustments to solve the problem, it’s a great alternative. And for those who do want to take it further and sort out their issues, Genelec can supply a detailed break down of your room acoustic via a GRADE (Genelec Room

Acoustic Data Evaluation) report. We’ll be putting that through its paces in a review of the latest Genelec monitors soon.

Getting cheaper

The complete high-end Genelec GLM and SAM speaker set up does cost – the better part of four grand including the optional GLM kit. But in the last couple of years, not only has the technology trickled down to more affordable ‘prosumer’ speakers by the likes of KRK and IK Multimedia, the whole concept of speaker modelling – if that’s what we should call it – has explodes sideways, outwards and downwards.

IK Multimedia’s excellent (for their price and size) iLoud MTM monitors were the first affordable speakers that I came across that attempted the speaker self-calibration thing. At around €400 per speaker it is a crazy price to pay for such black magic.

In this case that magic is IK’s VRM (Volumetric Response Modeling) technology which creates a 3D snapshot of your room via the ARC system software and measuring microphone.

I recently tried the system out on IK’s more recent and more expensive iLoud Precision 6 monitors (£999 each) and was impressed, not least because they identified similar issues with my room as the Genelecs had (yes I rather lazily still haven’t sorted the same room issues out!). It’s a similarly smooth process with impressive results. The Precisions are fantastic speakers anyway, but the ARC system is truly the acoustic icing on the cake.

Even more recently I tried out a very similar self-calibration system with KRK’s GoAux 4 speakers – and if you haven’t tried them, these portable speakers need to be heard to be believed – and they give you a similar room correction vibe for just £400 for the pair which is pretty incredible given the technology involved. Like I say, this once high-end self correction technology is now easily within reach for all of us so there really are no excuses for poor mixing and translation to other playback systems.

Beyond calibration

Proper speakers, then, have grown up in the last few years or, should we say, they’ve become better speakers. They are now not what you might call static speakers but more unconventional monitors that can move and adjust depending on where you place them. And some can even act like two different monitors, developing what you might call split speaker personalities, certainly a case in point with Fluid Audio’s latest release.

I recently tested the company’s Image 2 monitors that can turn themselves into the kinds of NS10 or Auratone style mid-range monitors you would have A-Bd your mixes on back in the good old days. Remember the old adage: ‘if you can make your mix sound good on these speakers, it will sound good anywhere’? The thinking with the new Image 2s is that you don’t need to AB with two sets of different monitors as these can act like two sets of monitors! And it’s impressive stuff. Hitting a footswitch sets up ‘Mixcube Mode’ and the Image 2s then switch to a mid-range mode where the mid driver becomes the main playback vehicle, with the low and high drivers effectively disabled. This allows you to focus on and tweak your mid range in more detail, hopefully resulting in a better mix overall. At £3600 for a pair of Image 2s, they are not exactly cheap, but you could look at them as two sets of speakers for the (high) price of one.

Going even further down the modelling route, Fluid Audio have also partnered with Sonarworks with the company’s SoundID Reference software integrated into Image 2s, effectively acting like Genelec and IK’s analysis software so that the Image 2s can auto-calibrate to your room. Sound ID takes the concept up a step or two, though. Not only does it use a similar microphone/calibration system to the ARC and GLM applications, but it also comes with built-in models for several famous headphones, so if you mix on a supported set, the software will automatically adjust the playback to be a flat response when you use them, resulting in better mix translation elsewhere. Again, clever stuff and because you are mixing using headphones, the room doesn’t play a part so more headphone models can be added and the software future proofed. The software can also simulate other playback speaker types –laptop, in ear headphones, car or smartphone speakers, for example – so you can check how your mix will translate on other systems with ease.

The future

There’s no doubt that with its powerful and flexible selfcalibrating software, the studio monitor has become an adaptable beast for mixing in the 21st century. In a way it’s had to; people mix everywhere – on the move, in hotel rooms and so on – and not just in recording studios any more. But with self-calibration technology within reach of us all – and more importantly being shipped with speakers costing just three figures – and software like SoundID able to emulate just about any setup, the future of monitoring and mixing will, literally, never be the same again. Your future studio monitor will be whatever you want it to be, wherever you decide to place it.