Studio Monitors
A studio monitor is a loudspeaker built to be told the truth by rather than to be enjoyed. The design goal is flat frequency response, low distortion at the level you actually work at, and a sound off axis that resembles the sound on axis, so what reaches you is what is in the file. Most are active, with an amplifier per driver and the crossover ahead of them, because that hands the designer the whole chain instead of leaving it to whatever amplifier you happen to own.
The thing to understand before anything else is that the room dominates the speaker. A monitor gets measured in a chamber, and then it goes into a rectangular box with parallel walls that adds peaks and nulls of ten decibels or more below a few hundred hertz. Those errors are larger than any difference between the monitors on your shortlist. That is the reason nearfields exist: sit close, and the sound arriving straight from the speaker is loud relative to the sound that has bounced off something, so the room gets a smaller vote.
Everything else follows from that. You are trying to hear the recording rather than the place you are sitting in.
Which one
Size the monitor to the room, deliberately. A big three way in a small room mostly reveals the room, which is why an eight inch woofer in a bedroom often produces worse mixes than a five inch one. Work out your listening distance first. Under about four feet, a five inch two way is usually right. Out past six or seven feet in a room with the space to support it, the larger box starts earning its keep.
Then set them up properly, because placement is free and it beats upgrading. The two monitors and your head make an equilateral triangle. Tweeters at ear height. Equal distances from the side walls, so the first reflections arrive symmetrically rather than smearing the image to one side. Off the wall behind them, or hard against it if the design asks for that, which some do. And remember a monitor on a desk is also playing into the desk: that reflection comes back a fraction of a millisecond late and puts a comb filter through the midrange.
Which one
Size the monitor to the room, deliberately. A big three way in a small room mostly reveals the room, which is why an eight inch woofer in a bedroom often produces worse mixes than a five inch one. Work out your listening distance first. Under about four feet, a five inch two way is usually right. Out past six or seven feet in a room with the space to support it, the larger box starts earning its keep.
Then set them up properly, because placement is free and it beats upgrading. The two monitors and your head make an equilateral triangle. Tweeters at ear height. Equal distances from the side walls, so the first reflections arrive symmetrically rather than smearing the image to one side. Off the wall behind them, or hard against it if the design asks for that, which some do. And remember a monitor on a desk is also playing into the desk: that reflection comes back a fraction of a millisecond late and puts a comb filter through the midrange.
Price, and the common mistake
What the tiers buy. Entry money gets a flat enough response, a real amplifier and honest limits, with the compromise usually showing up as a ported low end that is generous rather than accurate. The middle buys lower distortion, better drivers, a smoother response off axis and a cabinet that stays out of the way. Beyond that you are paying for controlled directivity, calibration, and the ability to play loud without strain.
The common mistake is buying more low end than the room can support, then mixing bass by ear into a peak that exists only where you sit. The second is treating correction software as the cure. It helps above the modal region and it can pull down a peak, but it cannot fill a null caused by cancellation, and it does nothing about when a reflection arrives. Absorption first. Subwoofers and correction after.
Price, and the common mistake
What the tiers buy. Entry money gets a flat enough response, a real amplifier and honest limits, with the compromise usually showing up as a ported low end that is generous rather than accurate. The middle buys lower distortion, better drivers, a smoother response off axis and a cabinet that stays out of the way. Beyond that you are paying for controlled directivity, calibration, and the ability to play loud without strain.
The common mistake is buying more low end than the room can support, then mixing bass by ear into a peak that exists only where you sit. The second is treating correction software as the cure. It helps above the modal region and it can pull down a peak, but it cannot fill a null caused by cancellation, and it does nothing about when a reflection arrives. Absorption first. Subwoofers and correction after.
Worth reading
All guides
Everything you've read about speaker placement assumes you have a dedicated listening room. A rectangular space with symmetrical walls, no windows on the speaker wall, a ceiling in the right range,...
What +4 dBu and -10 dBV do to your gain staging, what balanced actually buys, where a ground loop comes from, and how to match the levels of two pairs of speakers.
Worth knowing
A monitor you know beats a better one you do not. Whatever you end up with, the skill that matters is translation, and it comes from playing records you have heard a thousand times through the same speakers in the same room until you know exactly where they lie to you. That is why engineers keep speakers for decades, and why swapping monitors in the middle of a project is expensive in a way that has nothing to do with money.
Match levels before you compare anything. Louder sounds better to everybody, a decibel is enough to send you home with the wrong pair, and a showroom demo without a meter is a coin toss.
And know what a port is doing. Most affordable monitors are ported to get useful low end out of a small cabinet. Below the tuning frequency the output falls away quickly while the driver's excursion climbs. That is well understood and it is not a defect. What it means in practice is that a small ported monitor is not telling you much about the bottom octave, so check that part somewhere else before you sign off on it.
Worth knowing
A monitor you know beats a better one you do not. Whatever you end up with, the skill that matters is translation, and it comes from playing records you have heard a thousand times through the same speakers in the same room until you know exactly where they lie to you. That is why engineers keep speakers for decades, and why swapping monitors in the middle of a project is expensive in a way that has nothing to do with money.
Match levels before you compare anything. Louder sounds better to everybody, a decibel is enough to send you home with the wrong pair, and a showroom demo without a meter is a coin toss.
And know what a port is doing. Most affordable monitors are ported to get useful low end out of a small cabinet. Below the tuning frequency the output falls away quickly while the driver's excursion climbs. That is well understood and it is not a defect. What it means in practice is that a small ported monitor is not telling you much about the bottom octave, so check that part somewhere else before you sign off on it.
We take studio monitors on consignment and in trade. Tell us what you have.
Where to go next
The brands we carry
What you get either way
The listening room
Third floor at 215 East Lewis Street in Livingston, by appointment. An hour in the room settles this faster than anything either of us could write.
How we grade
Used and consigned gear is graded at the worst axis and never averaged. Every defect is named on the listing and the standard is published, so as described is something you can hold us to.