studio monitors and quality of home speakers Options

[Bartholomew MacG...]

Has there ever been a documented case of a recording sounding worse on quality home speakers because the studio monitors used to make the recording where of lower quality?

[mixminus1]

Define "worse".

For years, one of the studio standards for mixdown monitors were Yamaha NS-10Ms. They weren't/aren't within a stone's throw of any definition of "neutral" or "uncolored", and finding consumer-oriented speakers that are objectively superior is a fairly simple task, especially these days, but nonetheless, I'd guess the majority (vast majority?) of hit records from the 80s and 90s were mixed through them.

A good mix engineer "learns" their speakers, whatever they may be, and how mixes done on those speakers will translate to the enormous variety of playback systems that their recording will be heard through...and that's the key: translation. All speakers (and headphones, of course) sound different, so getting a well-balanced mix on a pair you know well is the best you can do, and then hopefully it holds together through other speakers, even if those speakers have very different frequency responses (and are in very different acoustic environments) than yours.

Note that this is really the key role that a good mastering engineer plays (or did, or should...): being able to hear if your mixes will translate well, and applying the necessary final adjustments to give them the best chance of doing so.

[Bartholomew MacG...]

Define "worse".

For years, one of the studio standards for mixdown monitors were Yamaha NS-10Ms. They weren't/aren't within a stone's throw of any definition of "neutral" or "uncolored", and finding consumer-oriented speakers that are objectively superior is a fairly simple task, especially these days, but nonetheless, I'd guess the majority (vast majority?) of hit records from the 80s and 90s were mixed through them.

A good mix engineer "learns" their speakers, whatever they may be, and how mixes done on those speakers will translate to the enormous variety of playback systems that their recording will be heard through...and that's the key: translation. All speakers (and headphones, of course) sound different, so getting a well-balanced mix on a pair you know well is the best you can do, and then hopefully it holds together through other speakers, even if those speakers have very different frequency responses (and are in very different acoustic environments) than yours.

Note that this is really the key role that a good mastering engineer plays (or did, or should...): being able to hear if your mixes will translate well, and applying the necessary final adjustments to give them the best chance of doing so.

Well, that's the strange thing because audiophile speakers are often advertised as being accurate and "true to the sound that the artist intended" but if the studio monitors weren't accurate isn't this so-called "accuracy" really a form of distortion and inaccuracy? And some of these speakers are quite expensive and even have new materiasl in them. For example, supposedly the company Wilson-Benesch used a type of carbon fiber that was new for their drivers, so it seems quite ironic that all this time and effort is just making things sound worse in an objective sense because it's not the sound that the recording engineers heard.

And to make make matters worse, their might not be the one true sound that the people who made the recording actually wanted because the decisions were made by multiple people maybe - the artists, the recording engineer, the mastering engineer, the producers, maybe other people who worked for the record company. I'm a drummer and one time we were recording some stuff and the engineer told me to change snare drums and I think what he wanted sounded worse but I didn't want to waste time arguing with him so I just went along with it.

It seems the best situation would be to listen at home on the monitors that were used during the mastering phase of the recording because that was when the final decision was made. So if someone used Yamaha NS-10Ms in the studio, they would be the best choice for listening at home. And I think they started out as a home speaker but were later changed for studio use.

[DVDdoug]

...And to make matters worse, their might not be the one true sound that the people who made the recording actually wanted because the decisions were made by multiple people maybe - the artists, the recording engineer, the mastering engineer, the producers, maybe other people who worked for the record company...

With big-label releases, the mixing engineer & mastering engineer will have different set-ups and the song will have been listened-to by many different people on many different systems. In the end, I would assume management gets the sound they want, or at least a sound that is acceptable to them.

Has there ever been a documented case of a recording sounding worse on quality home speakers because the studio monitors used to make the recording where of lower quality?

It seems to be a common problem with amateurs. You don't have to read many Recording Magazine Reader's Tapes Reviews before monitors (or lack of monitors) are cited as a potential contributor to less-than-perfect mix.