Studio Monitors?, Low budget!! Options

[Hamish]

I am on a very low budget approx £300 and I need monitors. What can anyone recommend? Active, or an Amp and monitors. Please help!

[kemikal]

i bought some event 20/20 monitors (passive for just under $300 ), added a carver amp to it.. and have unbelievably flat and pristine sound...check them out, the active ones have won many awards, but they cost $700 powered..
good luck

[holli]

BM5's BM5's!! Check 'em out, about £350 I think now.

[JackC]

If you can stretch your budget or hold off 'til you have a bit more cash; check out the Quested F11 active. To my ears; the best nearfield monitors. You'll never want to upgrade them.
Remember... great studio monitors are for life... not just for Christmas .

[holli]

Also.. almost all monitors work best when the amp is massively overpowered over the recommended power rating (especially at low levels) though this isn't so true of valve amps but I figure you're not intending to use one. Just remember to drive carefully!

[Presto]

Holli, could you explain that a bit better?

I remember pushing valve amps on stage further than I should have. I rather liked it and it didn't seem to harm anything, but I don't want to hurt my nice BM6As.

BMs are great

[holli]

I can try! I have BM5 nearfields driven with a Smartlight amp chucking out 300 W RMS per side. Smartlight are a British company and I stumbled on them quite by accident, very impressed but had never heard of them before. I've also heard BM's running on about 5 other systems with the standard 50-100W per side arrangement (you know, alesis type things that get bundled with BM5's quite often, hifi amps and better like Hafler, Yamaha).
Observations? Well I felt the overpowered setup produces a very, very much tighter controlled sound, particularly focused bottom end well suited to the Dynaudio driver across their range of monitors (M1's also work amazingly this way). More broadly speaking and to the point, I love the dynamic range. Words like effortless and unstrained spring to mind . Most people visiting my studio stroke their chin in an approving way and look slightly quizzically at the amp! I guess that's good?

My crtl room pot on the desk rarely makes it past 11o'clock, levels on the amp wound to max -why introduce any more stages of attenuation than neccessary to the signal path.

Bm6 'A' s are unfamiliar to me I'm afraid. I just have a gut feeling that it would be more expensive to put more power than 'neccessary' into a unit such as this and therefore an unlikely costing to be factored into the design process. I've no doubt these sound lovely given what dynaudio are capable of and have certainly been carefully tailored to the BM6, I just like the big amp thing .

In general, I believe it is less healthy to push a low powered amp run close to it's output limit for long periods of time through a monitor, than running a more than double spec'd amp at half it's output capability. Closer to the headroom of the amp's maximum output, it's more likely for continuous clipping to occur at this stage in the signal chain -especially with seriously compressed audio. Bye Bye tweeters!

As for valve amps, don't know how to eloquently explain the techy aspect with any concision The power ratings are always spec'd lower -but drive much harder, and sound better in terms of dynamics at lower powers. I know a few hifi buffs who have confirmed my thoughts regarding transistor amps sounding best when overpowered and underdriven. Check the links for some blurb that may go some way to explaining this.

http://sound.westhost.com/hfr_be.htm and a teaser quote below...

Class A push-pull output stages are inherently distortion-cancelling and each amplifying device, be it valve or transistor, operates in a complementary electrical sense at all times. Deviations of performance from the ideal of either device are compensated by the other. But with so-called Class B stages, one transistor of a pair is constantly switching in and out of operation, handing over to the other transistor during its period of no operation. An obvious difficulty here is to achieve a smooth changeover or 'crossover' (not to be confused with loudspeaker dividing networks), and the main reason for the 'transistor sound' of most early (and unfortunately some present-day) transistorised amplifiers is/was poor crossover performance (where the switch from one transistor to another failed to give perfect signal continuity) leading to a spiky distortion most evident at low Output levels and high frequencies. Many transistor amplifiers actually had better performance at high output levels, quite the reverse of most good quality valved amps.

http://www.whise.com.au/zero_delta.html

Monitoring is a pretty subjective experience at the end of the day. Valves may be sweeter with a detailed top end (though expensive for one worth having), transistor amps perhaps more neutral/less 'warm'? Certainly much, much cheaper and easier to maintain for similar 'build quality' of product.
The tonality is a matter of taste. Slightly overdriven (-not sure about this for monitoring accurately?)/valvey-smooth, or neutral (as far as is theoretically possible for any speaker) depending on what you like and how other well known programme is produced and compares..

..but the reproduction of dynamics is critical for me at least and is fortunately a fairly well understood problem for transistors and valves alike.

Hope this helps (someone! ) xxx

[Presto]

Thanks Holli for your very interesting analysis. You meant a too-many-watt amp sounds better as long as you don't turn it up too much and kill your speakers.

Well, if Hamish goes over budget and gets good speakers such as BM5s, he still has to find more cash for a good amp. Perhaps he could use a cheaper amp until he finds some more cash.

I personally think that speakers are usually the weak link in the listening chain. Although I'm no expert, I would tend to think that cheap speakers and an expensive amp are not as good as good speakers and an average amp.

Anyway, Hamish, whatever you get will be better than what you had before, and you may have to get some good mics which are usually the weak link in the recording chain.

If you start eating only potatoes and spaghetti, you'll still find you should spend more than you can afford on your gear.

I was able to spend 3 times your budget on my active speakers but as I will get a pro sound engineer to tidy up my recordings using his expensive equipment and experienced ears, it was more for my pleasure than an absolute necessity. I have a sneaky feeling I should have given more priority to the mics, but my ears are veeeeeeeery happy.

Although shops don't often have the best listening environment, you should go and compare what they have using your ears.

If you get active speakers, they will be balanced. The amps will be adapted to the speakers (or vice versa), but you may find a separate amp is more versatile - lots of inputs and only one on/off switch. I find it annoying having to walk round and switch off my active speakers to avoid spikes when switching other stuff off then on again later. In fact I often forget and cringe when I hear the spikes.

[holli]

BM5's and 6's even sound good with a standard hifi amp, 25-30 w RMS per side. Just better with more juice. I know many people who have run these in the short term, again just drive VERY carefully -even with a small amp such as the above, push to the max of what it can handle with hot programme and it's likely the tweeters will start smokin' Most hifi amps don't have an auto shoutoff to prevent major overloads.
Just to explain my thinking in the advice, Bm5's are now only £50 over Hamish's budget. He'd have to go alot further in price to get something comprable, Quested (nice!) Genelec, K roks. They can be made to perform like something twice the recommended price by adding fat amp later on, but why not start out with a hifi amp. I remember Alesis monitors being quite friendly as well, I had some on loan for a week or so. Very sweet but much more like a nice hifi! I think these would be in the price bracket.

[ryosode]

I use a pair of M-Audio SP-5B. I think it's below $300 (USD) and probably the only monitor I know that's well known at the price. It gets the job done and since these are active monitors, you won't have to worry about an amplifier. Just a thought...