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Best Studio monitor | Buying Guide : Things to consider while buying a Studio monitor

Whether you’re recording and mixing a big project or simply want to record your voice and guitar in your home studio, a set of studio reference monitors are essential. A good set of monitors will let you hear what you record with accurate detail. But before you buy a set of monitors, you most likely have some questions: What differentiates studio monitors from everyday speaker systems? What makes a good monitor? And how should an accurate monitor sound?

Your studio monitor speakers need to provide the most accurate, uncolored representation of your music as possible. Whether you’re recording, editing, mixing, or mastering audio, a sonically transparent monitoring system ensures your mix will translate well to headphones, car audio systems, TVs, and other listening systems. And because there is also more to consider than accuracy when selecting studio monitors, we’ve put together this guide to help you find the best options for your studio space.

Monitor components

The modern monitor is made of three primary parts: the drivers, the cabinet, and the electronic circuitry. Powered monitors—by far the most popular type these days—also include an internal amplifier.

You can’t really single out any one component as being more important. Every part is designed to work in conjunction with all the others. Having a great driver doesn’t do much good if the cabinet isn’t properly designed for use with that driver.

Drivers

There are two types of drivers in the typical monitor: woofers and tweeters.The more uncommon three-way monitor also has a midrange driver.

In 2.1, 5.1, and 7.1 surround-sound monitoring setups there will be a separate subwoofer (the .1 in such configurations).

In a two-way monitor, the woofer handles the low, low-mid, and midrange frequencies, while the tweeter handles the high-mids and high frequencies. With a three-way monitor, a midrange driver is added to handle the midrange frequencies. When you add a subwoofer to your monitoring array, the sub takes over a portion of the low frequencies and all of the very low frequencies.

Manufacturers use different materials to construct their drivers. Silk, mylar, glass, carbon, titanium, and metal alloys are all used to make tweeters. Mylar is a synthetic polymer developed in the 1950s that mimics silk, but is unaffected by humidity. Glass and carbon are used for applications where very high power handling is needed and produce an accurate, extended high-frequency (HF) response. The same is true of metal tweeters made of titanium and other metal alloys, which produce precise, extended HF response and can handle higher power.

Woofers, midrange drivers, and subwoofers are usually constructed in a conical shape with a dust cap at the center and a flexible-but-tough surround that allows the cone and voice coil to move in and out. The cone is usually made from treated paper or cloth, polypropylene, aramid fibers, fiberglass, or Kevlar. Paper and cloth are traditional cone materials used for their silk-like performance at a lower cost. Polypropylene, aramid fibers, fiberglass, and Kevlar are all alternative cone-building materials developed in a search to build the ultimate durable speaker cone. A lighter cone may have a faster transient response, which results in more accurate sound by responding more quickly to dynamic, high-frequency changes in the music.

Cabinets

A well designed studio monitor cabinet gets maximum performance from its drivers. Engineers design the cabinet around the driver. It should be as non-resonant as possible so the cabinet doesn’t alter or color the output in any way. For that reason, monitor cabinets are usually built from sturdy, stiff materials such as metal or dense plastics with internal bracing and specially designed joints to eliminate unwanted resonance.

The cabinet design often will also include ports or passive radiators—elements that aid the monitor in low-end reproduction, improving clarity and handling of bass frequencies. Radiused edges on driver openings and monitor corners improve sound clarity and sound imaging by cutting down on sound wave diffraction.

Circuitry

Aside from deciding whether you need a powered or unpowered monitor (more on that below), your main concern should be the types of connections it has. Check the inputs offered by the monitor to make sure they will work with your existing equipment. For connections, monitors usually have 1/4″, TRS, XLR, RCA, or S/PDIF jacks. Some offer only unbalanced or balanced inputs, and some have both.

Powered Studio Monitors

Powered studio monitors, sometimes referred to as active monitors, are by far the most popular choice for project and home studios. By housing their own amplifiers they eliminate the need for an external amp to drive them. Many are bi-amplified—each speaker has its own dedicated power amp designed to handle its frequency range, thus allowing the speaker to function optimally.

Unpowered Studio Monitors

While they don’t offer the convenience of powered units, unpowered studio monitors, also called passive monitors, have their own advantages. Because they require a separate, external power amp, these monitors gives you some flexibility in choosing your components and setting up multi-speaker arrays. They also usually have crossover circuitry for splitting of high and low frequencies.

Additionally, for those who already have a power amplifier for their studio, unpowered speakers may offer a price advantage since their cost does not factor in an onboard amp.

What makes a good monitor?

A funny thing about studio monitors: The first time you hear audio played through a quality monitor with a flat response curve, it may sound all wrong. But that’s only because your ears are used to consumer-market stereo speakers, which use tuning tricks to artificially create bigger, punchier bass, and more pleasant and friendly highs among other things.

So a large part of buying monitors is preparing yourself to hear things in a different way, and that means thinking about specs and features in a different way. Rather than looking for effects like bass boost, you want to focus on how accurately your speakers will reproduce sounds in your particular studio environment.

Numbers and specifications

When you’re shopping for monitors you’ll see a lot of numbers, terms, and acronyms such as frequency response, THD, and SPL, as well as more familiar terms like watts and driver sizes. (See the glossary at the end of this guide for full definitions.)

These specs theoretically provide a thumbnail sketch of how the monitor will perform during recording, mixing, and mastering. Some specs are the result of tests conducted by the manufacturer to determine the performance of their products.

While specifications are helpful, keep in mind that the tests that determine specs often are not standardized, so one manufacturer’s 0.01% THD may be another’s 0.3% THD. The information is still useful to you as a prospective buyer as long as you recognize that specs are just a starting point. Ultimately, you have to trust your ears—and those of gear reviewers and fellow musicians. There’s no substitute for careful, critical listening. Reading reviews both by experts and users can help you hone in on your best options.

Frequency range

Since you want accuracy from your monitors, one of the first things you will want to confirm is that they can handle the full frequency range of your recordings. Most monitor specs list the lowest frequency they handle in Hz (hertz) and the highest frequency in kHz (kilohertz). For most recording work a frequency response of 50Hz-20kHz is adequate. As we’ll discuss a little later, the overall frequency range may be a little less critical than the monitor’s ability to reproduce all those frequencies without distortion or variations.

Before you decide that a monitor is worthy based on its frequency range, keep in mind that this specification on its own doesn’t tell you how the monitor will handle frequencies. Sure, the monitor you’re looking at can handle a range from say 40Hz-21kHz, but how can you be sure it will reproduce those frequencies relatively evenly?

You want to see an indication of how much variation there will be across the frequency range. This is expressed in decibels. So, for instance, if a monitor’s frequency range spec is listed as 40Hz-21kHz ± 2dB, that indicates that some frequencies may be louder or softer by as much as 2 decibels at various points across the full range.

For most applications, a rating of ± 3 dB or less will provide well balanced sound.

If you work with bass-heavy music such as hip-hop or EDM, or work with 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound mixes, you might want to consider a studio subwoofer, which will handle frequencies down to 30Hz or lower.

Total harmonic distortion (THD)

The spec for THD (total harmonic distortion) is also an indicator of general accuracy, but in a different way than frequency response. THD lets you know how cleanly a monitor can reproduce whatever audio you feed it. Most of the time the term THD really refers to THD+N, (Total Harmonic Distortion plus Noise) so when you see THD, you can usually include noise in the equation.

Every audio circuit adds some noise and distortion; the question is how much. A clean audio circuit should be very close to zero in the amount of distortion and noise it adds, i.e. about 0.001%. A poorly designed audio circuit will add quite a bit of distortion, in the range of anywhere from 0.3 to 1%. While you aren’t likely to see these types of numbers on monitors, you often will see numbers this high (and higher) on consumer audio speakers and headphones; another reason why you shouldn’t use them for recording.

Wattage

While it’s usually not as much of a concern for studio situations, the power of your studio monitors, measured in watts, might be a specification to consider particularly for larger rooms or studios. Generally, 10-60 watts should be plenty for a bedroom or home office-sized studio. Larger rooms and mid-sized studios may require more than that. With powered monitors that contain their own onboard amplifiers, manufacturers match wattage to each driver for optimal performance across the driver’s frequency range.

Near-, far-, or mid-field design

When you browse Musician’s Friend for studio monitors, you sometimes will see the terms near-field, mid-field, or far-field within a monitor’s description. Ultimately, this refers to the listening configuration a monitor is designed for, with near-field being optimized for a close listening distance and far-field designed to carry the sound accurately over a greater distance.

Using a compact design and relatively small speakers, near-field monitors are good for most studio applications because they allow you to primarily hear the sound coming directly from the speakers, rather than sound that reflects off the walls and ceiling. They are positioned directly in front of you and angled inward so your head forms the point of an equilateral triangle between the two monitor enclosures. The optimal listening position is referred to as the “sweet spot.”