It’s kind of been a monitor week. The last question I asked got a number of responses about your monitors. In this week’s edition of Building a Home Recording Studio we’ll go into what sort of monitors you need and how to set them up.
How big?
Building your first home studio often comes down to compromises in money and space. We’d all love to have huge far-field monitors mounted to the ceiling pointing down on us.
Sadly that’s usually not the case.
We have to pick a good pair of near field monitors that are small enough to fit on our desks but powerful enough to correctly reproduce our mixes. And since we only have a budget of $1,000 we have to get a good enough pair that leaves us room to buy the rest of the stuff we need.
Budgeting
Let’s assume that we decided on the Focusrite Scarlett from last week’s post. That means we only have $700 dollars to spend on the rest of our equipment. By limiting our budget we also limit our options. In some cases that can be a good thing because you can spend hours upon hours shopping for monitors. If we limit our budget just a bit we can cut down on the shopping time.
I don’t want to spend much more than $300 on a pair of monitors for now, leaving around $400 for the microphones and such.
The IKey 5″ monitors are a good choice at only $129 each, meaning we’d get a pair for around $260.
This pair of KRKRP5 G2 are $299 with cables included, not a bad deal considering that you would need to buy cables anyway.
These Alesis 620 are also at $299, and they have a larger woofer than the other ones. This means an added bass response to your mixes.
It’s easy enough to find studio monitors in your budget. Just go to your regular online retailer, and input your budget in the price box. Find a brand you trust, or go by the reviews on the site itself. Some of the reviewers are very thorough in their reviews, often clarifying any doubts you had with that particular item.
I always check the reviews when I’m buying a product I’m unfamiliar with. It’s served me well so far, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t take advantage of them.
For more ideas on monitors, check out Cheap Monitors for the Budget Conscious Engineer.
Setting Up
There are three things you need to keep in mind when setting up your monitors in your home studio.
1. The Correct Height – You don’t want your monitors below or above your ears. You want those sound waves hitting your ears at exactly the right height. Place the monitors at the same height as your head, aiming the tweeters at the top of your ears. This enables you to hear the full frequency response of the monitors. If they are too high or too low you won’t hear what’s coming out of them correctly.
2. The Correct Distance – Make sure that your head is the third point in an equilateral triangle. The monitors need to be at the same distance from each other as they are from your head. Poor stereo imaging and panning problems will result if your monitors aren’t at the same distance from you as they are from each other.
3. The Correct Sound – I highly recommend using Auralex MoPads to decouple the sound of the monitors from your desk. If you just leave the monitors sitting on your desk it will act as an amplifier for what’s coming out of the monitors. This usually results in a lot of boominess and boxiness since your desk might be amplifying those frequencies. The easiest way to get rid of all that is to simply disconnect your monitors from your desk using the aforementioned MoPads.
Action Step
Have you budgeted for your monitors yet? Don’t overspend, make sure you have enough money to buy the most fun thing of all, microphones.
Image by: Cloddo
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