Want Advice/Opinions: Next Set of Monitors

[Rick Reineke]

There are "balanced power" devices available. . A friend of mine installed balanced power in his entire studio, which was built from the ground up, It was not a low-cost installation process though. btw, the studio is featured in this months issue of 'Mix'
.https://www.mixonline.com/recording/...-the-clubhouse

[Allan Black]

Originally Posted by Andrew Smith

Allan, that photo of you with the stacked champagne glasses reminds me of those champagne glass pyramids that tended to be the finale of something on TV back in that period of time.

What was the cultural thinking behind the glamour (or whatever) of having stacked champagne glasses?

Andrew

Hi Andrew. We’re a bit off topic, but that was the day in 1977, I signed for our 1940 building. To say I was excited is way under estimating it, and I was waiting for my acoustic and electrical engineers to show up, otherwise I’d have drunk the whole bottle. One ironic side story, over the years I tried to buy a good pre-loved Steinway grand piano, but here in Sydney they’re like hens teeth, gone in a flash. So I bought a good Yamaha G7 grand instead.

In 2001 after I sold our 2 story studio building, the developers built a 10 story apartment building with a shopping arcade on the ground floor. In the front shop was the Sydney agents for Steinway with 5 new grands, one placed exactly where I would have positioned mine …

[Paul R Johnson]

I love reviews like that (not). They throw a few details in then cloud it all with names. I remember a studio i visited twice in the 70s, when i was young. It was not in London, and loads of famous people recorded there. My memory says it was grubby, smokey, and not at all nice. Ive spoken in re ent years to ‘names’ who worked there a lot and they all said they really hated it, yet produced great work there. The record company picked it because it was cheap. I bet all the names dropped in that article have also worked in many studios, so having them on a list means very little. Details of the walls is solid info and useful, old pine flooring suggests they didn't have the money for new! I know they mean its antique, but its a ‘hifi’ type comment. The bit about mics going direct to pres is another. Most people do this by default. In fact, mics via patchbays has always been frowned on, but many multi facilities do it for convenience. Places here like Abbey Road and the BBC do it so rooms can be linked and they dont consider a functioning and noise free patchbay link a sonic issue? If you look at Abbey Road as an example, the room the Beatles and countless thousands have recorded in is pretty grotty. Rough walls, painted over many times, old original floors, countless year on year technical mods, old light fixtures etc etc. but it sounds good, and doesnt sound like the size of room it is. Some places are technically poor but have a great feeling, others the reverse, technically excellent but not good to work in. The workhorse studios make money by throughput and minimal downtime. Home studios can frequently perform equally as well as many pro studios. Being excited about old reclaimed wood is just silly! Thats decoration and marketing. I dont know for certain, but if you took the top one hundred quality and care concious recordings, hifi attributes would be sadly lacking. As in gold plug pins, oxygen free cable and general technical cutting edge, unmeasureable hyperbole.

[Allan Black]

But Paul ‘decoration and marketing’ certainly helps business, as does good acoustics. Here you can see in back, one of the Helmholtz resonators in our Studio A. The acoustics were done by the renowned Richard Priddle and the studio interior was built with Australian Mahogany timber, by 2 Californian specialty carpenters who bought a container load of Mahogany to ship back to SoCal for their custom furniture business.

I met them and was very lucky to buy the additional Mahogany they couldn’t fit in their container. You can see they aligned all the panels and bought out the timber grain with their special polish. Architecture Australia decided it was work of art and did an article on us and that bought in more studio business. You can see our 6’ Yamaha grand piano and it with the acoustics and bought in the Australian Flute Syllabus job, 10 teaching CDs for flute students over their 5 year course.
Cheers.

[Robert Lane]

So glad to see this thread has taken a life of it's own.

I miss the heady days of the forum where you'd start any topic and by the time you got to the latest post the subject digressed so far it was about what somebody's grandmothers' cat ate on Thursday.
Ah, I miss those days...

You guys keep sharing; it's heartwarming to see the stories and how interconnected we all are - and don't realize it.

Cheers.

[Allan Black]

Hi Robert, in the early days of video camera websites it was the other way around, on the Panasonic3CCDuser.com site, as mods, we used to encourage members to stay on the same topic with news and information on that subject. This was so other people could do a search of the site to find a subject that interested them, but times change.

Here’s something that might interest you and others. For my studio control room I bought and installed a pair of 16” Tannoy Classic speakers. Have you ever heard of ‘speaker rotation’?

In their cabinets, I was advised to rotate the speakers 180 degrees every so often because the heavy speaker coils would drag the robust speaker cones down over time. When they were new I took some fine measurements and sure enough this started to happen. Over the 24yrs I used them, every 18months I carefully unscrewed and rotated the speakers 180d.

This won’t interest everybody, but it’s worth passing on for anyone with big speakers. Cheers.

[Robert Lane]

Actually yes, I'd heard of that from an engineer at Capitol Records. They actually have a schedule of "rotations" they do on their most expensive and primary control-room monitors.

The reason I say it's good to see the thread take another life, is that back in the day this forum was THE place to get real-world, verified advice on just about anything going on in the production world. It's how I became a Panny consultant back in the mid-2000's.

Nowadays with FB and all the other social media outlets (I HATE Reddit... ugh) our beloved forum is seeing far less activity - which saddens me, because there's still a plethora of "old-school" talent that frequent here, that could share TONS of valuable information on just about every possible topic. Even how to clean up cat puke. hahaha

Cheers.

PS: I had another old set of Tannoy's, can't remember the model, but the cabinets were about 50% percent smaller, some form of redwood or Cherrywood and were one of the most organic-sounding monitors I'd ever owned. Until they were stolen. Oh well..

[Jim Feeley]

Hi Robert,

I'm currently looking for some new audio monitors, too. Not exactly your situation, but here's what I'm thinking:

Currently, I have some nice, but now older Event 20/20 BAS monitors. Even at my level (producer with an emphasis on audio post for corporate and small docs, with some music mixed in), there's an increasing request/need for at least 5.1 surround. I'm not sure I want to dive into that; I know people who are excellent posties and I will probably continue to turn to them. However, I want to buy monitors that I could include in a 5.1 system if needed. So I'm limiting my search to NFMs.

I'm considering:

Neumann KH80 or KH120 II
https://www.neumann.com/en-gb/produc...3-c4a11f018287
An acquaintance is mixing classical music on a pair of KH80s and is really happy, and a friend who is a full-time mixer for docs and music is really impressed by the KH80s (though he needs a sub and the Neumann subs are rather expensive). The Neumann monitoring alignment system (mic + software) is apparently finicky to set up, but effective: https://www.neumann.com/en-gb/produc...cessories/ma-1

HEDD Type 05 mkII (maybe Type 07)
https://hedd.audio/products/type-05-mk2
I don't know much about these, other than people doing work similar to mine like them.

Barefoot Sound Footprint03
https://barefootsound.com/footprint03/
I've always like Barefoot's speaker, and the 03, at US$2000/pair is their first sort-of-affordable model. You may have heard about the supposed hiss problem... I'm still trying to sussss out what's going on there. A design flaw? A QA issue? An internet rumor? Not sure yet.

JBL 306P MkII
Way less expensive than the others, but I've spent a lot of time in front of these. They're pretty nice and a pair with a sub costs only US$800. And that means expanding to 5.1 would be fairly affordable.
https://www.jbl.com/studio-monitors/306PMKII-.html

I'm not totally closed off to some other brands, but this is what I'm currently considering. But like you, there aren't any local dealers who have all these in stock. I live near San Francisco, so I'll probably head down to LA and listen to everything at Vintage King. https://vintageking.com

[Robert Lane]

The HEDD's will outperform everything in your list, mostly because the engineering is very tight and, they have a massive amount of tuning available on the back panel. I've never seen any nearfield with that much customization available - that didn't cost $10,000 a copy or more.

HEDD also have a specific 5.1 setup you shoud look at based around the 5" inch Mk2. It's hard to find on their website (might even be a sub-site) but if you can afford max-accuracy that's the direction I'd go.

The other, less expensive but also very accurate system would be anything from BlueSky. Check out the 5.1 Media Desk:

https://abluesky.com/products/mediadesk-5-1-mkii/

For whatever reason they've been very underrated for years and mostly unknown, but when I tested them for my now-defunct blog (during the recession of '08) I was blown away by their quality and organic output. At the time nobody else - and probably still - couldn't compare for the cost. Truly amazing units.

[Jim Feeley]

As far as I know, Blue Sky discontinued their MediaDesk line years ago. I don't want to invest in a discontinued product.

Have you compared the HEDD monitors to those from Barefoot and Neumann in a good listening environment? If so, I'd love to know more about how you thought they were better?

[Allan Black]

Originally Posted by Robert Lane

Actually yes, I'd heard of that from an engineer at Capitol Records. They actually have a schedule of "rotations" they do on their most expensive and primary control-room monitors.

The reason I say it's good to see the thread take another life, is that back in the day this forum was THE place to get real-world, verified advice on just about anything going on in the production world. It's how I became a Panny consultant back in the mid-2000's.

Hi Robert, did you see the revolutionary Panasonic GS400 consumer video cam in the early 2000s. That’s how I got involved with the Panasonic3CCDuser.com site.

Jim, currently a couple of corporate video companies here are investing in Dolby Atmos speaker setups.
The HEDD speaker outfit advertises it.

Cheers.

[Robert Lane]

Originally Posted by Jim Feeley

As far as I know, Blue Sky discontinued their MediaDesk line years ago. I don't want to invest in a discontinued product.

Have you compared the HEDD monitors to those from Barefoot and Neumann in a good listening environment? If so, I'd love to know more about how you thought they were better?

BlueSky did in fact cancel a few of their products but they are still very much alive and well. I haven't heard a MediaDesk in years but from what I remember you'd have to spend a LOT of money to get something better/more accurate.

[Robert Lane]

Originally Posted by Allan Black

Hi Robert, did you see the revolutionary Panasonic GS400 consumer video cam in the early 2000s. That’s how I got involved with the Panasonic3CCDuser.com site.

Jim, currently a couple of corporate video companies here are investing in Dolby Atmos speaker setups.
The HEDD speaker outfit advertises it.

Cheers.

I don't remember that Panny unit. What got me involved was that I was testing ALL the brand-new, handheld HD cams when they first hit the market

I landed on the HVX200 for several reasons and then started posting tons of info and how-to's here on the forum (those posts are still here, amazingly) because it was bleeding-edge tech and nobody really knew what it was capable of. I was pesonally blown away at what it could do and literally spent months testing and putting it through the ringer before I put it into a production environment.

Then Jan Crittenden, bless her soul, saw all my posts and asked me to come onboard as a consultant. Ended up going to NAB that year and met the engineers from Japan and other crucial Panny crew based here in the US. Amazing company. Considering how much smaller they are compared to Sony, Canon and even JVC it's incredible the tech they've come up with over the years. And how forward-thinking the company is, not afraid to take risks in new tech.

It's no surprise that going forward my production camera is also Panny-based, the Lumix S1H. Love that gorgeous organic Panny-chip color. Now if they would just put a global-shutter in the damned DSLR's... I'd be in heaven. And NO, I'll never buy the new Sony just because it has global. (see, here we go - disgressing the topic AGAIN!! hahahaah)

[Robert Lane]

BTW: It's interesting that a few of the responders to this post are "over the pond", specifically in the UK.

What most Amercians are totally unaware of, is that much of our best audio tech and even professional recording artists actually came from and/or originated from British companies.

Think about it:

- Naim
- Cambridge
- the Fairlight console (now part of DaVinci Resolve's software package)
- Wharfdale
- Audio Lab
- NAD
- Aston mics
- Tannoy
- Graham Audio...
- Judas Priest
- Elton John
- Led Zepplin
- Freddie Mercury... and the list goes on seemingly endless.

Lest we forget, where would the world of professional production be without the BBC??! That organziation's influence is legendary, not to mention a worldwide standard that every audio and camera manufacturer hopes to be blessed by. Forget about what Netflix likes, if the BBC says, "you're good..." then you're golden.

Personally I've always been blown away by the pre-WWII radio broadcasting capabilities of the BBC, shortwave, long-wave, Omega navigation... the world literally got all it's news from the BBC until the US and France started their own over-the-seas long-range broadcasts during the big war.

Again... disgressing away from the topic. So sue me. hahaha

[Robert Lane]

Originally Posted by Jim Feeley

As far as I know, Blue Sky discontinued their MediaDesk line years ago. I don't want to invest in a discontinued product.

Have you compared the HEDD monitors to those from Barefoot and Neumann in a good listening environment? If so, I'd love to know more about how you thought they were better?

I forgot to answer the question...

I've never heard Barefoot and don't have access, but I've never been impressed by Neumann over the years. I've always respected the brand because they get such good play, but the HEDD units will blow away anything Neumann makes, hands down.

In fact the only other brand that's in the same wheelhouse - as far as cost-to-quality-of-output is ADAM. There are others that surpass HEDD, but the margin of cost is so high you'd better own a multi-million-dollar post-house for it to make sense spending that kind of dough.

In fact I've settled on one of two 3-way monitors from either HEDD or ADAM for my new edit suite. I'm hoping to demo them both in California before the holidays, but even if that's not possible I know I'll be super-happy with either.

Ironically, if I could get a pair, even used, I'd get the BlueSky SAT-8's immediately. They're quite honestly one of the best, most analogous, natural and easy-on-the-ear midfields I've ever heard - again, that don't cost $10K a copy. But they were discontinued years ago, back during the recession. They would either give the HEDD's a run for their money or, be slightly superior. I don't know how BlueSky pulled it off, but they did. Trouble was the cabinet was too big for most and the output natrually high, so it was overwhelming for most home-based or smallish studios.

If I can find a pair - and I'm actively looking - I'll report back and take control-room samples so others can hear what I'm talking about. They're almost like the old-school large-cabinet Tannoys', they're magical and accurate in their output.