What is a good pair of monitors I can buy for $500. I want powered speakers.

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Alesis M1 Active Mk2

I like my M-audio Studiophile BX8's - they cost about 500 bucks- Also look at the KRK series of powered monitors- I understand they have some real good ones in the 500 dollar range./

I bought the M-audio BX8a. I took them home and used them for an hour and put them back in the box and returned them. Both speakers crackled a little bit when playing some of garageband's synths. When I got back home I reconnected my Klipsch 2.1 THX speakers that I bought in 2001 and the synths sound great. For almost $600 I was expecting great sounding speakers. My $150 desktop Klipsch speakers sounded better.

Now, the difference was also in the setup. I was using m-audio's firewire solo as my interface for the BX8a. My Klipsch speakers are connected directly to my iMac. I am sticking with my Klipsch for a while.

I never had that problem with crackling unless there was some distortion occuring inside the program (had that with Reason until I rased the samples per second in my audio preferences window- they miraculously disappeared at the cost of increased latency which is ok as there are workarounds to this issue). By the way, monitors are supposed to be ACCURATE, not necessarily "great" sounding...the idea being that you are getting an "accurate" mix that sounds good on even a crappy little ghetto blaster in somebody's garage.

My personal experience with all the M-audio monitors has been deceptive (save the last one, I've not heard still). The small are just multimedia monitors hence not qualifying at all (better buy some Altec Lansing the bigger boxes being muddy, and rather tiring.

Now, this subject has been treaded zillion times there's short lists of the cool ones around in this very same forum and in getting started (I have lots of troubles to connect since saturday, so I'll use my time for better things than the search anyone can do)

The Alesis Kaboom pointed to are reliable stuff, but Samson for example has great little things around too just to name them.

And yes SOS is a great magazine (I even read it!