Jean-christophe Boulay
Forum Replies Created
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I’ve never used AudioEngine products. I’ve never heard from anyone I know who’d used them either.
I may have been proposing some big models, then. ;-P
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
I’m a Dynaudio man, myself. It’s always hard to describe why you like certain speakers over others. Mainly, I think it’s down to how they translate, meaning that a mix that sounds good on these will sound good on most systems. That, like most speaker comparison points, is pretty subjective.
I’d recommend taking a look at Dynaudio’s BM range. The AIR series is a big letdown, IMO. The other big players that would be recommended often are probably Genelec, Alesis, ADAM, JBL, Blue Sky, Mackie and Yamaha.
Quickly, Genelec makes superb monitors, but their desktop series (the 8xxx and 6xxx models) is pretty weak-sounding for the price.
Alesis, I don’t like. I don’t know why, really. Their products just never elicit more than a “meh” reaction from me. I think it’s because they make USB speakers. Lame.
ADAM make magnificent monitors, but they don’t really know “cheap”. If you can afford them, these have great high-frequency detail and transient response. They almost sound too good for monitors. They also look incredibly nerdy. You decide whether that’s good or not.
JBL make too many speakers. With a range going from cheap, small home-theater to gigantic PAs worthy of a Rolling Stones tour, the studio monitors get lost somewhere in there and are not that popular. They’re very good, but I couldn’t list you a model name to save my life.
Blue Sky make neat little desktop speakers in practical complete systems. There are 2.1 and 5.1 systems, with central control knob so you have your volume handy. I’ve only worked a bit on these, but they sounded pretty good at the time.
Mackie make great nearfield monitors. The HR824 are kind of standard in many music-production circles and the smaller HR624’s keep most of the same character. Mackie also has a budget company, called Tapco, that also makes surprisingly good models for a price point.
Yamaha are popular in the monitor business mainly because they made one really crappy speaker, the NS10, that sparked a revolution. They keep making crappy speakers, only these ones don’t spark a thing. To be fair, their higher-price models sound good, but fail compared to the competition at the same price point.
I hope this helps you in your search. You didn’t mention what size or budget range you’re looking in so I went pretty generally. If you need more precise info, just ask and I’ll see if I can dig it up.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Those levels make perfect sense as dBFS. The trouble a typo can cause!
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
I’d imagine it was a typo and it’s supposed to say “dBFS”. Do the levels make sense in dBFS? If it asks for anything over zero it can’t be, but I can’t find info on a BFS scale. Mind you, I’m having trouble finding readable Chinese broadcast specs.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Here’s a link to a rather classic Sound on Sound article on headphones mixing.
https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan07/articles/mixingheadphones.htmMost of the important points are well covered and you should pay special attention to the “Simulating The Loudspeaker Experience With Crossfeed Plug-ins” box around 2/3 down. If you really can’t have monitors around, crossfeed systems can help quite a bit. Mixes should always at least be listened to on speakers before stamping them as final, though.
IHTH
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
+1
that audio is absolutely FUBAR. We’re in FBI forensic audio territory here.
Everything John said is A1 advice. It’s not always practical or possible to fully test the signal flow with the complete set of performers, so always leave quite a bit of headroom. And check your gear during the event. There had to be red lights flashing somewhere to produce that audio. Action at that moment would’ve salvaged at least part of the thing.
That’s what school is for. On an important paid gig, you would be sweating quite profusely right now.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
There’s nothing wrong with your interface. I’m not 100% familiar with the mic input on it and its gain structure, but it is a very good interface. The reverb is not supposed to be routed to the input, it’s for monitoring purposes only, that’s the whole point. I wouldn’t know Soundbooth if it came up and bit me in the pants, so I can’t help you there, either, but you can definitively set the level coming from the interface input. Read the manuals, you have the tools.
And don’t trade in that interface for an M-Audio. That would just be silly.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
What channel format were those tracks mixed to? If you have 6 full-freq tracks, I imagine that would be 6.0. You have a center surround track on top of the usual L,C,R,Ls,Rs? That isn’t really standard at all. The best move then would be to create an audio track, with the same length, bit depth and sample rate as your 6 others, that contains the sound of silence (not the song!). Import that as your LFE channel to encode, which will give you a Dolby Digital EX-compatible 6.1 output. The LFE will be dead, but you’ll sidestep a few potential headaches at playback. Compressor does this perfectly.
Be aware that the LFE channel is there for a reason; surround speakers are usually not full-range boxes and will produce little or no LF. The LF will come only from the LCR trio and, for the bass image to be grounded in space, the mix should reflect that, with more bass sent to the center than the LR pair.
So it’s pretty easy to output the AC3, but your mileage may vary depending on the mix. Even simpler would be to feed the discrete tracks directly, if that’s possible on your installation.
IHTH
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
When dealing with fussy Wav files, having Sound Devices’ WaveAgent handy has always helped me.
https://www.sounddevices.com/products/waveagent.htm
It’s free, easy to use and lets you split/combine multichannel files and reads all metadata. If you can’t get it to work with that, you probably have a corrupt file and should get another delivery. Or let your sound guy do the conversion. We sound guys always prefer doing conversions ourselves.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Go for the MBox!!! No question in my mind at all. The mic preamp in the MBox 2 Mini is good enough for your use, IMO. It’s absolutely not worth screwing up your complete workflow for a Studio Projects pre. The VBT1 is a budget preamp that will not likely add much to your sound, especially with a budget mic plugged in. The MBox should sound pretty much the same and you’ll get ProTools.
Really, no competition.
IHTH
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com