Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of Yamaha

December 5th, 2009 – When I worked in a nice studio, we had a pair of the venerable Yamaha NS10′s. To be honest with you, there are much better sounding speakers for the money, but the way that they showed how ugly your mix sounded helped a great deal.

The frequencies that they boosted and showed a lot of clarity in, are some of the hardest frequencies to mix in. As they say, if you make a mix sound good on NS10′s, the mix will sound good on any speaker. Because the NS10′s focused me on what was wrong with the mix, I could fix problems much easier than on speakers that make all music sound good.

Up until now, I’ve been content mixing with headphones, some cheap desktop speakers, and a set of nice bookshelves. Since I’m mostly producing music for myself, I can spend time going to many different speakers and gathering data about the way the song sounds, without investing in decent monitors. However, I’m thinking of getting back into producing other people’s music, so I need to get my work done efficiently and effectively if I don’t want to lose money by taking forever.

To that end, I’ve been once again looking at getting some decent monitors. Since I work a normal job by day, I don’t exactly have thousands to blow on a super high end solution. A year ago, I posted about the Genelec 6010A‘s, and I’ve been reading reviews on them. Of course, speakers are such a personal thing, that it’s hard to rely on the words of another.

It’s been suggested to me by many of my peers that I look into the Yamaha HS50M’s. The HS50M’s are the spiritual successor (even down to the aesthetics) of the NS10′s. Unlike the NS10′s though, the HS50M’s are active which means that I don’t have to worry about matching a good amp to it; it’s already built in. With a little EQ tweaking on the back of the speakers, I understand I can get a sound close to the NS10′s.

What monitors are you using and why? What speakers would you suggest as an alternative to look at?

Yamaha HS50M