Listening Variety with your Speakers

In past articles we’ve talked about proper speaker positioning, acoustic treatment for the control room and other ways to get your mixes to translate well to other systems.  There are devices on the market that are affordable and can help even out a given room’s poor acoustic response.  Check out JBL’s MSC 1 Monitor Control System, KRK’s Ergo or IK Multimedia’s ARC software plugin solution for options in this area.  We’ll take a look at these further in the future.  For now though, we’ll take a more simple approach for mix playback that makes use of what you may already have on hand – multiple speakers.

If you’re operating any kind of studio you probably have a good set of studio monitors plus some other speakers of various quality sitting around.  It’s nice to have a top line pair of Genelec’s with room correction in a well-treated space but most of us probably can’t afford that solution quite yet.  What I’ve found is that in mixing for various sources (CD mixes, backing tracks minus vocals intended for live use, film or TV) is that it helps a lot if you can hear your mix on different speakers to make sure everything translates well.  The Talkback column in the June 2009 issue of Mix magazine features my commentary on a method I used for mix playback via different sets of speakers.  It seems like overkill but the process gave me some really good perspective as to how my mixes would stand up on different systems.  The best part was that I didn’t have to keep rendering mixes to CDs or iPod just to run down to the car or living room stereo to hear them – I could work on the mix using any set of speakers.  Here’s what I did, a version of this approach might work for you too.

First, do yourself a favor and pickup a power amp so that you can run passive monitors/speakers.  You don’t need a ton of wattage, just something clear and clean.  Next, you should invest in a decent speaker switcher.  The 4-way selectors from Radio Shack work but from experience, I’d recommend something more robust.  The idea here is to run or split off the studio outs into your main monitors and then into the power amp.  With a speaker selector connected to the power amp you can connect as many pairs of additional speakers as the selector will support.  (Note that it’s a good idea to research ohms and speaker loads here to match the capacity of your power amp before hooking everything up.)  Now the fun begins.  Get some cheap, lo-fi speakers and hook them up.  Add a pair of typical home stereo bookshelf speakers.  How about some small PA speakers too?  That describes what I did.  A pair of small speakers that approximated typical TV speakers, a pair of old PA system speakers and a pair of free-standing home stereo speakers are what I setup.  The PA speakers were nice to crank a mix through and hear what it did at loud volumes through not-so-great speakers.  The home stereo ones gave me an idea of what people would listen on in their living rooms and the small, TV-like pair let allowed me to make sure the critical elements of my mixes translated on a typical TV. 

The nice thing about this is that you probably have the components to try this already to some extent.  Space might be an issue but you’re not looking for precision here – just multiple listening options so placement isn’t as critical.  The goal is to roughly understand what your mix will sound like on different systems and while it’s not an exact science, this process can be a good way to achieve that when high-end monitors and a properly treated acoustic space aren’t an option.  Even better is the fact that if you have the high-end monitors, a treated room or both, this approach can still make a difference.  Give it a try, anything goes in what you use for speakers.  Cheap cast-offs on EBay might be the little gems that help you find the perfect mix when used along with your regular monitors.