KRK GOAUX 4

ON-THE-GO MONITORS

By Wesley King

Since recently reviewing Ableton’s new Note app for iOS and iPadOS, I’ve been greatly enjoying the ability to tinker around with musical ideas and concepts on the go. I’ve found that it’s not such a bad thing becoming untethered to the darkness and crushing quiet of my home studio, which is in a room situated in one of the corners of the garden-level basement of my home. Being down there has always felt like it’s more amenable to the serious, focused work of mixing and mastering than letting creativity flow freely and easily.

But moving out of the studio with Note, Garage Band, or similar apps has had its challenges. As much as I like the fidelity and privacy of a “personal listening device,” such as IEMs or a classic set of studio headphones, having your ears plugged or covered has both advantages and disadvantages – and I don’t really always love the feeling of being “wired-in.” It honestly just feels like it’s one more way of interfering with the creative flow. But you can’t just have a set of studio monitors with you everywhere you go. Or can you?

That’s the promise of KRK’s new GoAux 4 studio monitors: A compact, good-sounding pair of decent speakers, designed specifically for use in creating music anywhere the mood strikes.

First Impressions

When you unbox the KRK GoAux 4 set, you’ll find everything nicely packed into the system’s included carrying case – a lightweight, padded nylon bag with a carrying handle and detachable shoulder strap. There’s just enough room for everything to fit snugly inside, although it may be somewhat telling that some of the cables are hiding in the external side pocket of the case, rather than inside. My one complaint: It’d be nice to have just a tad bit more room inside for cables, bits, and bobs.

The speakers themselves are compact and of a typical KRK design, sporting main drivers with the company’s trademark yellow driver cones. While most studio monitors come without grilles, given the portability and need for ruggedness, the GoAux speakers do have sturdy, integrated grilles over both the main driver and tweeter.

At the risk of denigrating the product, the GoAux 4 system has a computer-speaker-like design. By that, I mean that one of them (the left in this case) has the amplifier circuitry, connection points, and power plug, while the other (the right) is merely a remote. This makes sense, given the use case. The alternative would likely have been heavier, for one, but also less easy to make the audio connections and would require a second AC outlet, too.

Those connections are more flexible than I’d have expected. From an 1/8-inch stereo plug to dual RCA to dual ¼-inch TRS, you’ve got options. Moreover, a USB Type B connection is provided that can be connected directly to a computer and acts like an audio interface. Like the game-show announcers used to say, “But that’s not all!” There’s even Bluetooth on board (more on that below). Note that cables for the connections to your computer, tablet, phone, etc., are not provided; pick what you prefer, and toss that into the pocket inside the top panel of the bag.

The design of the speakers themselves consists of the main cabinet enclosure, with an adjustable tilt base that easily attaches to the bottom of the enclosure and allows you to point them toward your listening position for optimal quality.

The attachment is done with a threaded knob, much like the one on a typical camera tripod. My one complaint about this is two-fold. First, the knob has no U-clip to “capture” it in place on the base, so when unfastened, the knob has to be stowed somewhere, and I’m afraid of dropping or losing one of them. Second, a nice touch would have been to design the carrying case so that the units fit inside with the bases attached. Alas, they must be removed to be put in the case.

Finally, KRK has provided a nifty feature: automatic room correction. Much like home-theater systems, set your speakers in place, plug in the provided correction mic, position it at your listening position (where your ears will be), and press the ARC button on the back of the left speaker. A series of tones are initiated, and EQ will be set based on the results of the test.

Of course, you can easily set the LF and HF EQ levels manually.

In Use

One thing I loved about KRK’s rollout of the GoAux 4 is that they chose to shoot a video for the product and its intended use cases featuring — wait for it — a produc ing DJ. Paul Blair (aka DJ White Shadow) was shown traveling with and using the GoAux 4s, and frankly, I share a lot of his enthusiasm for the product. As he says in the video, using them instead of headphones allows you to get up, move around the room, experience the music in a more natural way, and even allows you to share the experience with others nearby for a change. (Just be mindful of your neighbors in adjacent hotel rooms, I suppose!)

Subjectively, the KRK GoAux 4 set sounds good — really good — which is what I’d expect from a product with that cool KRK logo sitting on the front. But to bring this back down to earth, it’s important to manage expectations, too. With a 4-inch driver, a speaker can only give just so much low-end.

But the GoAux product isn’t intended for final mixing or mastering. It’s built for composing, ideating, and collaborating on the go, and for that, you don’t need a 15-inch subwoofer’s worth of low-end. What they do offer is frequency response at –3 dB SPL of 65 Hz to 20 kHz; the actual range of reproduction is slightly wider than that, just at a lower SPL.

Finally, for general listening, the onboard Bluetooth is a really useful and hassle-free thing to have available. Be aware, however, that the wireless connection does introduce enough latency to be both noticeable and problematic when doing anything other than general music listening. For actual production work, you’ll definitely want to use a cabled connection, the simplest very likely being the plug-and-play “USB-as-an-audio-interface” route. It’s class-compliant (no drivers needed), and that means you only need a single, common, easily replaced cable to hook things up in most situations.

Conclusions

As usual, KRK has packed a lot into a small package with its GoAux 4 system. It’s relatively affordable (about $420 on the street for the set), ready to take with you nearly anywhere, and provides a ton of flexibility to do your thing wherever your travels might take you. Hopefully, a future “V2” of this product will address the capacity of the carrying bag, and let you just keep the bases attached to the cabinets. But even without such improvements, the KRK GoAux 4 solution is a nearly perfect one for modern music production on the go.