Originally Posted by teashea ➡️

Beware of those old school proponents of old monitors / old design monitors. They are generally pathetic. One example is the NS10, which is as miserable a speaker as one can find. A complete joke. The frequency response is a series of mountains and valleys like the Tetons. Just because they were used in the past does not make them competitive with the best monitors made today. Engineers used them in the past because all monitors back then were awful.

Originally Posted by Sparklepants ➡️

Okay. So, one of the issues with a lot of mid-range "prosumer" monitors is a lack of headroom.


Making a speaker that can handle both very low and very high SPL equally well, without noise or distortion, is a lot more expensive than making a speaker system that sounds good at typical living-room volume levels.

One of the reasons why headroom is important for professional monitors is because you need to be able to work with whatever the source material is. If you have incoming raw drum tracks with peaks at -18dBFS, and an average signal level around -30dBFS (a totally reasonable tracking level), and if you want to hear if there is a squeaky kick drum pedal at, say, -60dBFS, then you either need speakers that are capable of deafening SPL, or else you need to start processing the audio, before you can really hear the low-level detail.

Monitors are really personal things. Some people really need to feel the lows, and can't mix without feeling the punch. Other people don't care and just mix on NS10s to get the balance right, and leave it to mastering to sculpt the lows. Some people get fatigued and burnt-out quickly on clinical-sounding monitors, while others need that total transparency to perceive the good, the bad, and the ugly, and get frustrated with "sweet" sounding monitors.

My personal favorite nearfield monitors are Barefoot MicroMain 26. Which a lot of other people with great ears also choose. But there are other people who have made awesome-sounding records that everyone knows and loves who prefer designs from ATC, Ex Machina, and others.

I am not especially a fan of some of the lower-tier Barefoot offerings I have heard, especially the Footprint 01.

I think one of the best "deals" in nearfield monitors is a used set of JBL LSR32p, with or without matched subs. I don't personally love ported designs, but those early LSRs were excellent speakers, much better than the later LSR iterations, and Bob Katz once cited them as the only nearfields suitable for mastering.

NS10s have no lows or extreme highs, but their waterfall plots in the midrange are almost perfect, and they are still a phenomenal choice for getting the balance right.