Buying Guide: How to Choose the Right Studio Monitor For Electronic Music
It is important to start off with professional monitors as early as possible. This is because you need to get accustomed to listening to non-colored sound.
The time comes in every electronic music producer's life when a professional grade studio monitor becomes a necessity. Many musicians start out with consumer grade equipment including speakers. Then they slowly upgrade their gear as soon as they can afford each equipment.
It is important to start off with professional monitors as early as possible. This is because you need to get accustomed to listening to non-colored sound. And that is the sole purpose of the professional studio monitor: To reproduce sound as purely as it is, without adding any equipment specific characteristics, which is normally called sound-coloring.
Room Acoustics
The next important step is to make sure of proper room acoustics. This is because, although your monitors may clearly reproduce any sound, if you have certain objects in the room that cause audio reflections, your final sound will still be colored. This means that a very expensive monitor does not make sense in a room full of reflective surfaces. So you must reduce your reflective surfaces, use soft padded furniture and also apply foam treatments. The next thing to do then, will be to decide on monitor size, based solely on the size of your room.
Active vs Passive Monitors
Active Near-field Monitor
An important choice you will have to make is between passive and active monitors. A passive monitor is simply a speaker system while an active monitor is a speaker-and-amplifier combo. Each of these two types of speaker systems have their pros and cons and of course active monitors cost more money naturally.
Passive Near-field Monitor
The simple fact is that if you don't have a professional grade amplifier and speaker wire for a passive monitor, then choose an active monitor which already has a pro-grade amplifier that fits exactly with the speakers.
2-Way vs 3-Way
A two-way monitor will have just the woofer (the larger speaker cone) and a tweeter, while a three-way monitor will have a woofer, a mid-range speaker and a tweeter. Frequency filters are normally used to filter sound to the different speakers. That is, lower frequencies to the woofer, mid frequencies to the mid-range and high frequencies to the tweeter. This is called cross-over. Some active monitors will even have two or three different amplifiers for respectively a 2-way or 3-way active monitor.
Near-field vs Mid-field vs Main Monitors
The important thing when considering monitor sizes is the size of the room. The logic is simple: a small or near-field monitor for a small room, a large or mid-field monitor for a large room, and a main monitor for spacious studios.
Most small studios are best served by a near-field monitor, but if you work with bass-intensive genres like Hiphop or Reggae, then you may consider a mid-field monitor. But you have to pay attention to the space between you and the monitor because the more bass a monitor produces, then the farther away it has to be from you.
Subwoofer
If you can afford to buy a subwoofer, then cool, else just forget about it. Monitoring with sub-woofers can be tricky anyway, so you normally have to switch them off while working, and then once in a while, switch them back on to monitor the effects. Else if you steadily have sub-woofers on, then you run the risk of coloring your sound.
Making Your Best Choice
It should be quite obvious to you by now that the best monitor choice you can make will depend on certain criteria, like how much money you are willing to spend, how big your space is and the music genre you are focusing on.
About Nik Liak
Musician, producer, DJ, promoter, and electronic music enthusiast alike, Nik Liak hails out of Thessaloniki, Greece. When not performing, he spends his time in the studio creating his own music…aided by his beloved dj gear and an upbringing in a very musically-influenced home.
Contact Nik Liak at nikliak@musicngear.com
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