What does price matter nowadays?

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With MKS' recent thread about the Samson Rubicon monitors, something kind of stuck out in my mind and got me thinking.

In this day and age the old saying of "more for my money" is really starting to come around. You can go out and buy 8 class A mic preamps with ADAT output for $600....before you'd have to pay over $1k easily. Mics that cost as little as $300 produce stellar results...and even some cheaper ones if you know what you're doing. Monitors that cost less than your monthly car payment are giving great results. The list goes on about produtcs that are basically costing very little but producing results you could *easily* get with much more expensive equipment, which in turn makes it seem as though this "budget" gear is really underpriced. While computers will cost as much as they always do, factoring that into a studio starting based around what we can call "budget" gear can cost as little as $6-8k (based on "budget" mic sets and the aforementioned pre's and monitors, including a top of the line computer)...The studio equipment I have priced out will run me about $11,400 (not including shipping). And that is "chump change" compared to what guys like Andy Sneap and James Murphy are running. I'm really wondering lately why someone would actually spend copius amounts of cash on equipment when obviously you can achieve fantastic production with a fraction of the bill?

That's not to say that the more expensive stuff is a waste of money, by any means. Sure, an Apogee/RME/Crane Song's converters are going to be higher quality...but does it ever reach a certain point to where it's not worth the money, realistically, for someone to pay that much to have that minor jump in quality? Why would you need to spend $1.5-2.5k on a single Neumann microphone when you can get 3-4 mics from RODE for much less and still get top notch results?

Again, I'm not trying to say that the higher-ended stuff isn't worth the money. But for someone that isn't doing full out label production...why not save some cash?

Take someone like me for example. I'm starting up my own place, basically dedicated to the local acts around my town. They want professional sounding production but without the professional sounding price tag. The first key to offering that combination is to not buy the high end gear. Companies realize that and have been working the past few years on developing equipment that does just that: provide high quality results with a much smaller price tag. If I'm not having to pay an arm and a leg for the equipment, the same rings true for the bands. While I can shell out the $11k for the equipment, I'm willing to only charge $20/hour (which is "unheard of" in this area, I might add) so that I can attract musicians. The stuff I'm getting, however, produces great results. RME interface, PreSonus DigiMaxFS 8 channel preamps, Event TR8 monitors, Mac Pro dual 2.66, Audix/RODE/Sennheiser/Shure mics and a few other things that will give fantastic production given my abilities behind it all.

I guess what I'm trying to get to is my subject line: What does price matter nowadays? Do you really need to spend that extra $400 on something because it's "what the pros use"? Or does a company's longevity in the business really make a difference these days? It seems to me the answer to both of those questions would be a simple "no.". With the the line between "you get what you pay for" and "holy shit this should cost a lot more" being blurred more and more these days, I really can't see a reason to dish out the arm+leg for an entire setup.

Again, with all of this said, I've worked with some amazing gear in the past (SSL consoles, Neve pre's, vintage Nuemann mics, superb outboard gear, a huge list of stuff that people drool over daily), and don't get me wrong, there's obviously a reason why people get hard over that stuff. However, with just a bit more effort you can get similar results with much cheaper equipment. Like I said, it is probably easier to achieve with the more expensive stuff...but what's a couple more minutes knob tweaking so you can save a couple thousand dollars?

I'm curious on everyone's thoughts about this subject.

~e.a
 
I know what you are saying, its kind of a sliding level, you get to a certain point where you have to pay alot more for a slight but better product.

There's definately a consumer market and a pro market but I've never been too snobby about this, as I've used plenty of consumer products in the past and got great results.

If it sounds good.......
 
The thing is (at least for me), when you have good but "cheap" equipment, you always end end wanting better and better (to achieve better quality in a lesser time). And with time, you also end up hearing the differences between let's say a Studio Project and a Neumann and realize it's not just the name on the box that makes the price difference... So yeah, but...
 
Well yeah, like I said, I've worked with the stuff that costs a billion dollars...it's just, I've also worked with the "budget" stuff...and realistically yes, as you said, there's still going to be that "want" to get a good sound in less time...but seriously with just a couple more minutes fooling with it, I can't see the reason to find a vintage Neumann on eBay and pay $2-3k for it, when a RODE NT2000 is doing a superb job.

I'm really glad Andy chimed in on this, it's good to hear from someone who does have the gajillion dollar setup and recognizes that consumer level things aren't all that bad. :p

~e.a
 
elephant-audio said:
Well yeah, like I said, I've worked with the stuff that costs a billion dollars...it's just, I've also worked with the "budget" stuff...and realistically yes, as you said, there's still going to be that "want" to get a good sound in less time...but seriously with just a couple more minutes fooling with it, I can't see the reason to find a vintage Neumann on eBay and pay $2-3k for it, when a RODE NT2000 is doing a superb job.

I'm really glad Andy chimed in on this, it's good to hear from someone who does have the gajillion dollar setup and recognizes that consumer level things aren't all that bad. :p

~e.a
Click to expand...
my 0.02 is that the facilities that have high end gear, have high end acoustic construction. the room matters alot. more than gear really. but what matters even more than that stuff is time. time to say lets try this or that. time to really get the drums sounding great. time to fiddle with the guitar tone. most projects dont have the budget to go to a "big room" and spend alot of time on everything.
i think that with decent gear like the rme and presonus stuff(that level of gear) you can get as good or sometimes better sound if you have the time to do so than if you were in an expensive studio with "professional gear" and limited time. now, if you have all the time in the world in a "big room" with "professional gear" you would see a pretty big difference on the same recording(if you recorded the same songs in both situations). this might not always be true, but i think it would be true most of the time.
i think if you have good engineering skills and time to get the sound you want out of good players with good instruments, you are set for the most part(assuming you have at least a good prosumer setup).
 
I agree with all of you. To expand a bit:

In order of importance... (IMO, of course)

1) Good songs
2) Good musicians
3) Good engineer/producer
4) Good mixing/recording environment
5) Good gear
6) Good nudie pictures

To Andy's point, all of these operate on a sliding scale to determine the final outcome and are by no means independent of each other.

To e.a.'s point, pro-sumer gear and good recording technique can definitely get you in the race. Most people out here on the Internot (*cough* Gearslutz *cough*) don't seem to emphasize that good mic placement is one thousand billion times more important to getting a good sound than a $5000 A/D converter, for example.

Super nice gear might make our jobs easier, but that's just one part of the equation.
 
I think pauly and sugar summed it up for me...what I really was trying to get at (even though I failed to mention it :lol:) was basically if you're good enough at tweaking shit and can make something that didn't cost an arm and a leg *sound* like it cost an arm and a leg, why bother with the multi jillion dollar crap when the band can't play for shit anyway? The most important thing realistically to me is the band itself. They have to be able to play their shit. Plain and simple. That's where it ALL starts. If a drummer can't play for shit, you can still pump every perfectly placed 4 billion dollar mic you have on his kit through 4 jillion dollar preamps into 1 billion dollar converters, up through a million dollar interface/console and through a a gajillion dollar set of monitors. But. It'll still sound like shit. Regardless of the technical aspect that it does sound good...the production...anyone will still say it sounds like shit simply because the drummer sucks. We all do that. The guitars may sound great...but because it's sloppy playing, it really sucks. The playing of the instrument is essentially more important than the instrument itself. The instrument only sounds as good as the player. Just like if you take an awesome guitar player and give him a shitty guitar...I'll bet he can make it sound like something totally different. Meanwhile the adverse effect of a shitty player on a really nice instrument, will make the instrument not sound good. So that is an example of why I think the player is more important than the instrument, or rather the "quality" of the instrument, itself....it goes back to the old saying "can't polish a turd".

James Murphy pointed something out to me earlier when I showed him the thread. Basically what he was saying is that people make this decision every day: Buy the consumer level shit or the pro level shit. While it does seem obvious that people that are only doing local acts (like myself) wouldn't be buying the high-end stuff, it mainly just irks me about the people that will only be doing bedroom productions of their own personal stuff, and are talking about getting a $3k preamp to run their SM57 through. That is, I guess, where this started for me. Thinking about that and then MKS' thread about the consumer level monitors. There is a lot behind that whole deal..so I won't bother explaining.

I've lost my train of thought on this post (damn phone calls!), so I'll leave it as it is.

~e.a
 
It's a bit OT, but:

2 good friends of mine are well-known techno/trance-producers (Marc Acardipane & Special D) who own the greatest equipment (Apogee, Avalon, Brauner, you name it they both got it). They are both addicted to getting the newest and/or greatest gear.

Marc once said to me while we were eating: "I wish I had your modest homestudio, because then I'd be making music again!" ... because he says that his gear acquisition syndrome is so bad that it keeps him from finishing tracks because he thinks something could still be done better if he ONLY had this-and-that piece of equipment (we're talking about a guy who has a 1TB backup drive just for his Hollywood/Movie-FX samples that he never uses, but you never know, there might be the situation where you need it and THEN you have it ...). NUTS!

Keep in mind: this is someone who has more than 300 releases under his belt ...

EDIT:
What I really was going to say was: VERY often the internet community that raves about equipment has no credibility. If Andy Sneap, Colin Richardson, Andy Wallace and Andy Johns (big number of Andy's in this game) were talking like that, it'd be a different thing, but very often those who make the most fuzz about great gear are the ones who don't even produce/record/write anything ...
 
Very good posts on this thread guys. I think its fairly misleading that people suggest something sucks, just because it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Having said that, at any cost, some pieces of equipment are better suited to certain things than others. I'd love to have more professional opinions on prosumer products - sometimes in the price range it is hard to tell what is good and what isn't. I think the judgment of 'cheaper' products is also skewed by those that will only use high-end expensive gear with no second thoughts.
 
i've been in the djungle of thailand to do a recording.. we improvised a studio in a bamboo-hut, didn't have clean electricity, only mics we had were sennheiser evolution series, drumkit has been an old pearl export, on which i put the resoheads on top, because there was no way to use the orig top-heads, during recording kids were running all over the place and crickets and lizzards were making noise like crazy......everything but optimum!!!
BUT we had great musicians (fury in the slaughterhouse, guano apes, cultured pearls etc ) and great producers/engineers (jens krause, olli sroweleit (great!!) and me (ok.....) ).
olli told me "music is performed IN FRONT of the mic, ideally your job as an AE is not to make something sound good, but to capture the feeling the artist spreads" (more info on that püroject on: www.home-projekt.de

of course you gotta reach a certain status before you can afford thinking like that (my usual customers have a marlin by hohner, which they can't even tune, put 500 bucks on the table and tell me "it's gotta sound like nickelback").

but this production in thailand really brought me a step up...listening to that music noone ('cept an AE perhaps) noone is thinking "em, the kickdrum might be a little too....", it doesn't really matter, it's about the feeling it provides, not the frequency spectrum, don't forget that music is an art (no matter what genre), and the first goal should be to make the artist be heard.
when people look at a great painting they look at the picture and they don't discuss about the chemical ingredients of the paint....

i don't wanna say "sound does not matter", but there are way more important things to get a great result than expensive converters...

i often worked with singers, that coulnt really perform standing in front of a micstand...sometimes i just gave them an old 58, of course an u87 sounds better, but i don't care, as long as the artist does not feel comfortable in front of that.

but it's getting OT....
i've no problem with working on cheap stuff, as long as it works for me.
i find myself more and more often to work on my cheap yamaha hs50 instead of working on the genelec or adams, just because the yamahas work for me...

of course we all are gearsluts, but sometimes you've got to be a businessman also, and ask yourself:" does a mic twice as expensive make the client pay twice as much, does it pay off?"
in most case it doesn't, and you've gotta find a compromiese between your GAS and your brain.
 
Only contribution I can make is that of the actual output of the recording process has changed.....people now listen to highly compressed and lesser quality audio on ipods, webcasts, etc wheres 5 or 10 years ago everything was CD quality. Maybe it's easier to get away with not having that gear that squeezes out those extra few bits of quality if your end product is on myspace or iTunes. Personally, I think that's cool as there is less unrealistic demands on local producers and studios to get that Metallica rhythm sound or that Lombardo snare. As some of you guys have put it...the gap IS smaller as a lot of the time the end product of the new Slayer or Iron Maiden album is heard at the same 192 kbps bitrate that our stuff is.

Great thread by the way.....am currently rebuilding my home studio and am firmly in the "prosumer" ballpark, but ultimately having a shitload of fun...that's the point the way I see it :headbang:
 
Here's a little excerpt from a chat that I had with my friend Jeff "Critter" Newell the other day. He's a long-time producer/engineer who among other projects worked with A Perfect Circle, Guns'n'Roses, NIN and lately Angels And Airwaves, so he is used to working with some of the finest gear available. He started answering my question about the SSL Bus compressor that I really didn't like when I tried the Waves plugin.

Critter:
SSL compression is an odd thing. My usual settings are such that the meter needle bounce around 4-6 db. It will get softer, not necessarily smaller. (Louder is usually percieved psychoacoustically as better)

Multiband compressors or an L2 will actually make mixes sound larger.

The main theory behind the ssl 2 bus compressor is if you mix through it, it gives a certain punch. If you apply it as the last stage, it will dissapoint. Unlike slapping an L2 on your mix after the fact. That will actually make your mix sound better.

Most modern rock is uber compressed. Radio stations have a multiband limiter that mixes go through. Which is why some shitty records sound great on radio. And some great records sound like ass.

In general, the realpolitik of making a record is such that you need to cater to unimaginative A&R who have no concept of the process. So the more your mix sounds like the radio, the better. Unfortunately, once it hits the radio, it's ridiculously compressed and sounds like ass.

Some mixers have actually mixed singles through the actual electronics of radio compression, but the reality is that if one mixes something well, it will translate. Unfortunately, it seems lacking to A&R.

It's one of the things I detest about pond scum mixes.

(Edit: "pond scum" is our little name for the Lord-Alge brothers)

SMY1:
So basically, what I should try is switch on the SSL bus compressor as the first thing and then set it as desired with makeup gain so that the output is as loud as without the compressor? And then mix through it?

In theory that would give me the "ssl punch" you wrote about, without the perceived drop in loudness?

It's weird, the Sonalksis Stereo Compressor plugins seem SO much more effective than the SSL bus compressor. Effective = increasing loudness, glueing things together and creating "punch".


Critter:
Then use that. There is nothing holy about the SSL compressor. It's a legacy charm. At the time it was the best punch for the buck as hardware. An L2 works much better at the moment (hardware and software)

And yes, mix through it first thing.It's such a dominant flavor of the mix, that it seems silly to not manipulate the magic from the start.

As I said, I'm not familiar with the compressor you mentioned, but if it seems more effective than the SSL, then for god sakes, use it.

Wistful reminises about tape machines are due to years of figuring out how to exploit them, because they were the status quo. And every person who tells you to record to tape is a nostalgic bastard.

I did a comparison between 30 ips tape into protools versus straight into protools (24 bit). Absolutely ludicrous to tape and transfer.

(5 ips with a 16 track headstock does make a difference. Otherwise, you are being a dipshit)

Realize half the advice you are given is by people who spent many moons figuring out how to exceed the limitations of technology because that was the fact of the moment. But I'm auto tuning on a powerbook, with all my favorite plugins and really, I could do every album I did on my humble laptop.

The greatest lesson I ever learned was that if doing things wrong sounded better, by all means do it.

Trust your ears. They are the point.

SMY1:
Yea, that's what I am telling myself all the time. It's just nice to be able to ask you (someone who has actually used a full SSL console) when I am thinking "how can it be that this 200 Euro plugin is so much better than the supposed holy grail of 2bus compression ... maybe I am just handling it wrong?". :)

Critter:
Technology marches on. And it always comes down to ears.

And you have them. So trust them and screw us old farts with the jaded dialogue.

It was the holy grail, but then, I couldn't release songs off my powerbook.

Embrace the warm bath of possibility and stop listening to us old farts. We are old farts because we listened.
 
I'm a believer of anything is possible with the right mindset. The only time I feel you need quality is between the head and the hands. Expensive gear gives you confidence but cheaper gear gives you more time - and surely the more time you have to experiment with the gear the better. If you've booked a session at AIR studios you are always clock watching. If you've booked a few weeks at Arse studios for the same cost of a day at AIR and you take the years of knowledge you gained you can create something unique.

OT but yet on Topic - how are you finding the TR8's - when I switched my pair on put some mp3's through I nearly cried at the level of detail - now I've heard really great monitors that cost 3k a pair (pounds) and they were truly awesome but I've found the TR8's to be maybe 2/3rds as good as the 3k esoteric set but at 1/8th the price - and fucking hell how loud are they even at -15db attenuation.

A really very good engineer friend of mine always states that the only limiting factor he has when he works is time - be it a anathema but he feels confidence from neve desks and nuemans and gets great results quick, but the same can be said for any mic/desk if you adapt to the situation. That being said expensive flashy gear does get clients in through the door - but an expensive flashy sound must be produced in order for them to return.

I agree - if you are flexible and avoid snobbery - you can overcome the 'deficiencies' of any equipment and usually in that process discover some great sounds along the way.
 
I really like the TR8's. I just quit the studio on Friday. But before I did we had a few pairs of different monitors. Mackie HR824's, KRK RP-8's, Even TR8's, Alesis M1mkII's, and a pair of NS10's recently acquired off the 'bay. The TR8's (out of the entire collection) are very nice moni's. Very loud, very detailed, and one hell of a bang for your buck. Case in point, I seriously (after working with ADAMs and Genelecs) think these monitors *should* be in the $1200/pair range, but I'm glad they aren't :p They are easily on-par with the Mackie HR824A's which are $1200/pair. Which is why I think the TR8's should be in a higher bracket than they are.

It seems much easier to get thigns to translate when mixing on the Events than the KRK's and Mackie's. That's not to say those are bad moni's, it's just I found that everything translated faily better with the TR8's, on certain things.

On-Topic:

I really like how this is going so far. Getting comments from all corners of the game is really helping to shed light on the matter.

~e.a
 
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