Cheap studio monitors

[CW14]

I'm looking for a cheap pair of studio monitors, but I don't really know anything about them to base my decision on. What makes some better than others?

What's a good value for money, inexpensive set of studio monitors? Are the Behringer ones any good?

Thanks.

[Dr_simon]

Behringer make very cheap knockoffs. The are great if you want cheep and cheerful, like a desk for gigging or live drum compressors. They do not make state of the are kit.

For mixing you want near-field (sound is independent of the room acoustics) flat response monitors. Flat response is important as it mens your mix will translate to other systems, like car stereos, MPs players and Hi-Fis with the best chance of sounding as good as it can be.

This is why it is very hard to mix on either headphones or stereo speakers as they color the frequency output making it sound better than it really is. This is fine if the system you are mixing on is the only system you will ever play the music on. If it is not. be prepared for some nasty surprises.

I started out mixing on headphones. I got what I thought was a great mix and then played it through a boom box for a friend. All the harmonies were out.

ooops !

Another good think to look for is active speakers that are bi-amplified. This cut down on distortion by not sending frequencies that the speaker cant handle off to be played.

I have Alesis M1 Active Mk IIs. They were about 400 bucks.

[Kevin Taylor]

Paradigm makes some decent stuff. Look around for old 3se or 5se speakers or the studio monitor series.

[SPL]

Unless your room has good acoustics, I'd say it's not all that important how good your monitors are. In other words, don't go spending 1000's of dollars.
In choosing what to buy, look at what is available in the price range of your budget. Then look at the specs and see which monitors have the widest frequency range, the closer to 20Hz to 20kHz the better. Meaning, what are the highest and lowest tones this monitors will produce.
Next thing you want to look at is the frequency response. This describes how every frequency is represented by the monitors. Are there any significant dips, peaks, roll-offs? The flatter the frequency response, the better. The reason why stereo speakers "color" your sound is because they usually have a mid frequency range dip (known as scooped mids to guitarists), making it appear the music is louder, crisper, boomier... than it really is. In other words, it's a total misrepresentation of the music.

What is a good monitor all depends on what your needs are. If you're mixing down a million dollar studio project you'll want the absolute best. If you're just messing around with multi-track recording for the first time, some $200 M-audio monitors will probably do the trick. It all depends...

[magicninja]

Yeah getting a mix to sound good out of every playing source, ie. car, home system, tiny boombox, tv, computer, ipod. is somewhat difficult. There are moniters that have digital settings to let you here what it may sound like coming out of these devices. These allow for the best mix downs. So it don't sound great in the stereo in your room but like crap in your friends car stereo.

[CW14]

Alright, thanks for the responses.

My dad just found a cheap pair of active monitors, so we went with that. The brand is "Legend"... I dunno if anyone's heard of that. I don't need anything fancy, because the rest of my setup ain't great, I'm just starting to get into the mixing side of things, so the PC speakers had to go.

It says:

Full-Range 2-Way
Active Nearfield Monitor
Power (RMS): HF 50W / LF 50W
Magnetically Shielded

I dunno what all that means. Is there a way to test how flat the frequency response is, and the pitch range?

[magicninja]

Well I know magnetically shielded is so it doesn't mess with your screen. Sometimes in the manual they show a graph for frequency response. The closer to zero across the board the better. Beware of spikes in the middle. you usually have a climb in the response farther down the right of the graph.

[SPL]

I dunno what all that means. Is there a way to test how flat the frequency response is, and the pitch range?

You could test it, if you had the proper equipment, but your best best is to have a look at the spec sheet.
Look for two numbers, the first one will have Hz behind it, the second will have kHz. Basically you want both of these numbers to be as close to 20 as possible. Anything higher for the first number and you'll lose low end, anthing lower for the second and you'll lose high end.
The other thing you want to look for is a graph/curve that shows frequency response. The more this resembles a horizontal straight line, the better.

[CW14]

Didn't come with any manuals or anything. I think it'll do the trick for what I need it for anyway.