Monitors help

[Genius Gone Insane]

Let me explain my situation:

So my band's studio is like 25 minutes from my house. I like to record drums, vox, and guitars there and then do my mixing at home, where I've got 2 alesis MKII monitors and a Digi 001. The problem is every time I want to record I gotta bring the 001 and monitors to the studio (which is quite a pain in the ass!). Now I don't mind doing this to record drums, but I'd like to be able to spend more time messing with guitars and vocals without bringing all that crap out to the studio.

At any rate, I'm probably going to get an MBox or something small like that with only 2 inputs for the studio so I can get vox and guitars done there. But I cant really do it without good monitors. Do you guys know of any inexpensive monitors I could get that would help produce decent sounding guitars and vox? I do NOT need to do mixing and mastering specifically with them, just need them to get a decent guitar sound. I'm hoping to grab something off maybe ebay for around $100 US.

Thanks for any advice! Any help here would be hot.

 

[egan.]

for that amount of cash I would stear away from cheapo monitors and think more about a good set of headphones.

 

[evildonkeymaster]

I used the older version of the 5" M-Audios called the SP-B5s for a long time. With out a sub you loose everything below like 70Hz but great for guitars and genral flat response mixing. You can find a pair for 150 on ebay. Again I do not recommend mixing and mastering a full mix through these unless you have to I did for a while.

 

[axeman720]

save your money on the mbox and put the extra cash towards the monitors. 001 isnt much harder to lug around and honestly i think it sounds far superior even if you are using the ins on the mbox that dont use the internal preamp. the mbox is usb powered for chrissakes and people wonder why it sounds like piss. for the money i relaly like the maudio bx8s the bottom end is a bit hyped but the high end and midrange are basically untouched and honestly i think they sound great for the money. i'll never forget i was in guitar center in orlando and i told the salesgirl that i like the bx8s and she immediately said oh i hate those monitors blah blah so i made her AB them with the mackies, krks and alesis and the look on her face was hilarious when we switched them on. it looked her dog just got hit by a car or something cuz she knew she had made herself look like an ass. anyway enough rambling...

check the bx8s, the samson resolv 65s sound lightyears better than the alesis imo, the small krks are ok but have a strange midrange notch, the rolands are CRAP imo and i actually like the behringer truths so what i'm sayin is, go listen for yourself!

 

[evildonkeymaster]

Black_Sugar on this forum uses the Bx8s with great results he loves them too. I agree cheap monitors can be a waste of cash especially when the Bx8s are like 399. On ebay I have seen them go for 300. Mbox sucks I agree.

But again if pure guitar refrence is all you need and 300.00 is too muchget the smaller M-Audios like my post says above or the BX5s.

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

I agree with egan here, you'd better go for a good set of headphones you could use in the studio and at home. I recently used a borrowed mbox and I really thought that this was not very good, but considering its price you can't ask for the moon...

 

[James Murphy]

i will never for the life of me understand why so many people buy into the Digidesign Mbox and 001/002.... these systems place artificial track count limitations on you.. it truly sucks. Pro Tools is great if you can afford an HD system, but all the rest of their systems suck ass! for my portable system i have a powerful mac laptop running Digital Performer and i use MOTU's 828mkII interface. i have been running beyond 48 tracks at 44.1/24 wthout hassles... just TRY and do that with a PT LE system... you can't!.. not even with the same computer.

by the way, i'm using some little krk v4 monitors that i forget the price of for my mobile rig. self-powered and easy to transport.

 

[black sugar]

Black_Sugar on this forum uses the Bx8s with great results he loves them too. I agree cheap monitors can be a waste of cash especially when the Bx8s are like 399. On ebay I have seen them go for 300. Mbox sucks I agree.

But again if pure guitar refrence is all you need and 300.00 is too muchget the smaller M-Audios like my post says above or the BX5s.

Guilty as charged. I love the BX8's. Very flat freq. response.

Axeman, have you tried fiddling with the switches on the back to tune them to your room? Also, are your speakers mounted/isolated? Your listening space/setup is a whole can of worms...

I acutally find the bass response tight and pretty accurate, but I have trouble with too much presence. I have a lot of reflective surfaces to deal with -- glass desk, hardwood floors, blinds behind the speakers, etc., but I it's my bedroom (and I rent) so I can't get too crazy with sound texturing.

I'm still trying to figure out where the hell to get some Owens Corning 703.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

i will never for the life of me understand why so many people buy into the Digidesign Mbox and 001/002.... .

I got the 001 because the guy who recorded our demo used Pro Tools. I didnt know that here was such a big difference between LE and HD so I went ahead with the recommendation from guitar center and got LE and 001. Ha ha yes I can hear some of you laughing already but I'm very satisfied with it.

The only other system I've used is Nuendo which to me isn't bad, but I much prefer PTLE. I'll use Nuendo for the VST plugins like aptrigga or Sonic Maximizer....

I didn't know M-Box was USB!!! wow, I'll have to think twice about it. I'm thinking of just getting a cheap soundcard and run Nuendo to do the vox and guitar tracking but I'd rather stay in PT for all the tracking just for simplicity sake. That would give me extra $$ for good monitors. Who knows, I might just ebay another 001 for the studio if I can find one cheap enough.

 

[egan.]

i will never for the life of me understand why so many people buy into the Digidesign Mbox and 001/002.... these systems place artificial track count limitations on you.. it truly sucks. Pro Tools is great if you can afford an HD system, but all the rest of their systems suck ass! for my portable system i have a powerful mac laptop running Digital Performer and i use MOTU's 828mkII interface. i have been running beyond 48 tracks at 44.1/24 wthout hassles... just TRY and do that with a PT LE system... you can't!.. not even with the same computer.

Out of curiousity James (and way off topic), do you mix on your portable rig as well or do you move your sessions to another system? I'm just wondering if you leave DP (move to PT, logic or whatever) and how/if that works for you.

 

[James Murphy]

Out of curiousity James (and way off topic), do you mix on your portable rig as well or do you move your sessions to another system? I'm just wondering if you leave DP (move to PT, logic or whatever) and how/if that works for you.

no, i don't mix on the mobile rig.. it's really just for tracking. i mix on my big system at home usually, which is also a DP system.. just much more powerful. sometimes i have to bring projects from DP into other sysytems though and i usually just render all the tracks as waves and import them quite easily into the new system that way. occansionally i have done it by saving the file from DP as as OMF file, which is an open format that most major DAW vendors have adopted.

 

[Mato Barla]

Hello everybody.

Is Digital Performer only for Mac or there is also Win version. Thanx.

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Only for Mac.

 

[axeman720]

i dont personally own the bx8s black sugar, i've just used them a few times. the switches seem to help a bit but remember they are detented switches with 3db increments i believe so if you need more control your prolly want to get a good room eq to tune the speakers to room.

and james, i pretty much invested in my 002 because the price was killer, you payed much more for your DP and motu setup then i did for what i have i'm sure (i got it discount from a friend who owns a big pro audio company) and the interfacing between studios. the studios i work at usually only run mix systems or HD systems. so i just bring hard drives with me from home and fire it up with no questions asked. i dont have to use something like the digitranslator to transfer my mixes from DP. pro tools was the only thing that made sense, believe i budgeted out nuendo and dp systems, they just didnt make sense for what i wanted to do.

 

[unsilpauly]

i will never for the life of me understand why so many people buy into the Digidesign Mbox and 001/002.... these systems place artificial track count limitations on you.. it truly sucks. Pro Tools is great if you can afford an HD system, but all the rest of their systems suck ass! for my portable system i have a powerful mac laptop running Digital Performer and i use MOTU's 828mkII interface. i have been running beyond 48 tracks at 44.1/24 wthout hassles... just TRY and do that with a PT LE system... you can't!.. not even with the same computer.

by the way, i'm using some little krk v4 monitors that i forget the price of for my mobile rig. self-powered and easy to transport.

hey there, my name is paul and i just wanted to say that i agree with james on the dp vs. pro tools thing. an 828mk11 is way cheaper than a 002 rack(about the same with a dp4 upgrade from audio desk). i have been using the 828 with dp4.12 for a little over a year now in my project studio with a emac 1ghz with 1 gig of ram and have done recordings with up to 30 tracks running effects on every track and sure it gets slow but it hardly ever crashes(like three times in a year, which is pretty damn good and when it does its usually my fault) so i think it is probably the best deal for the money and its probably just as good as protools anyway.

as far as monitors are concerned i have had the event tr8s for a while and i think they are pretty damn good. they dont really tire me out after long periods of tracking/mixing. i havnt tried the bx8s but i havent ever heard anything bad about them ever and its usually good stuff you hear like on this forum. the behringer truths are really good too. my friend has them in his studio and he replaced his alesis with them and they sounmd way better than the alesis. i would check out the events, the tr8s and the truths and get the ones that you like the best. i also would get definetly 8 inch woofers. i had smaller ones before and they really sucked for mixing. even when i swithed to the 8 inch woofers my mixes immediatley sounded better. good luck in your search.

 

[Ermz]

I've heard that it's almost universally accepted that the Behringer Truths sound so horrible that in the end you're forced to make your mixes sound great, since 'great' is only 'barely adequate' through those things.

I've been hearing some good things about the Wharfedale Diamond 8.2 Actives... anybody got any opinions on those?

My search for a decent monitoring/playback system continues...