Tips on picking a studio monitor

Here's some subjective preferences and tips on how to choose:

Passive:
- What amp to get?
Alesis RA series is nice bang for your buck to start off with.
Samson servo is also a nice line.
After that, anything from crest, QSC or crown.
You can buy second hand to save you some bucks.
- What speaker to get?
Very personal. Go listen to high end bookshelf speakers in stores.
Polk, Dali zensor, Q Acoustics 2020, Wharfedale diamond 10 series or newer 20 series, Kef Q series, B&W 686, Focal chorus 706, Atom mini monitor, ... are just a few brands you can take a listen to.

Advantages of passive?
You can upgrade a single component. When chosen right, you can end up with higher end audio with less costs.

Active:
- When are we talking about high end pro audio?
Only slightly starts when you start paying 500 bucks per monitor.
Really starts when you start paying anything over 1000 - 2000 bucks.
- Is everything underneath that crap?
No, there are some really proper monitors.
It's all very personal. What do you like in music?
In the end, it comes down to learning how to mix on a certain speaker. There are very high end monitors that everyone agrees on sounding utterly crappy, but, if you get it to sound ok on that, it sounds amazing on anything else.

- What size?
8 inch gives you better bass representation. Anything underneath and you'll be trading in big size proper bass for smaller size artificially created bass
Small rooms can handle 8 inch speakers but you need better treatment.
So, if you want to save money and pick small, you'll probably need a subwoofer to be able to properly hear the low frequencies.
When placing a subwoofer, you need to look into room modes and carefully place the sub. Then you need to dial in a proper cross over frequency and maybe some phase correction.

- Room treatment?
Every room needs treatment. May be minimal to expensive, depends on what you want to spend. Minimum treatment can come with minimum costs and a very big advantage over no treatment.
Treatment is there to prevent reflections of sound waves that changes the actual sound you hear as opposed to what it should be. There are some other goals but this is the main one.

- What models , price range?
Anything cheap: Anything underneath 100 bucks a speaker.
You need to learn how to mix on these and compensate. Train your ears, learn your speakers by listening to stuff that you know how it should sound. Listen to the same stuff on multiple systems from very high end to lower.
KRK, stay away from them. They over exagerate the bass compartment.
Mackie brought out a cheap line, the CR line, they sound pretty well for the price range but same thing goes for them as the krks (rokkit that is, the vxt line is nice).

- Medium quality monitors:
My favorites: Mackie MR8, Yamaha HS8, JBL LSR 308, Adam F7

- Semi pro:
Focal Alpha. These are my monitors now that I upgraded from KRK rokkits and I absolutely love em. Only downfall is that pretty much all active monitors come with a white noise floor level.

- Pro:
I'm too skint for this price range but I know genelecs are nice, focal also has some very nice high end monitors.

- Subs:
Subs should work with passive or active. Depends on how much you want to be cutting and stripping wires (how much that scares you).
Before I decided to go with an insanely big monitor (imo that's 8 inch), I looked at a few subs.
My favorites:
Presonus temblor by far for the bang for your buck.
Cerwin vega, cheap good sub. Magnat supreme, polk sw, krk, adam.
Important could be that you have full range monitors that you want to be able to bypass the sub for, or you want to hear how your mix sounds on smaller speakers with less bass. So, you might want to run your sub seperate or have a sub with a bypass feature.


Anyway, this is all very personal and all very dependent on what you want. Best thing is to go listen to them in the store. Then, buy them at a store that has a 30 or 60 day return policy. The monitors will sound different in your room due to treatment differences, mode differences, etc.
Decide where you want to cut the margins. Do you want best bass representation but no sub? Do you want a cheap small quick solution, don't care too much about bass? Etc.

Good luck!
 
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Great thread man! One of the most important things i've learned with monitors is that you need to reference them. No matter what you're mixing on, you need to know how they should sound. Anyone can make great tunes with some $200 monitors if you know how things are supposed to sound.
 
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