26 l December 2013
www.prosoundnewseurope.com
studiofeature
PMC speakers (and the ubiquitous NS10Ms) in Spirit Studio, Manchester
Main adaptors
Digital room correction has transformed the nearfield monitor. Is the main monitor next, asks Phil Ward
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM goes like this: studios have downsized, if not disappeared; nearfield monitors have proliferated, balancing casually on the chassis of a desk; and monitoring has become a more mobile pastime. In due course, the manufacturers have had to exploit new generations of DSP to offer compact solutions the chief goal of which is to overcome room inconsistencies. Main monitors, as a result, have been consigned to luxury projects and a regrettably neglected corner of the portfolio – monuments to a lost, golden age with a business case increasingly difficult to prove. Well, maybe. Recent
developments suggest that main monitors are far from the dinosaurs assumed by the digital recording hegemony, and may in fact present new opportunities, in the
right hands, to combine the best of a valuable electro-acoustic heritage with today’s itinerant studio fodder. Even, or especially, where mixing platforms have lost the shelf space to park the beady-eyed nearfields, main monitors could still have a role to play beyond the ancien régime of facilities.
CONTROL ISSUES Latterly, of course, many makes old and new have used software control as a marketing hook. If production is going to be more acoustically arbitrary, what better than to adapt the monitoring to your space and, furthermore, anywhere else. Denmark’s Dynaudio Acoustics was very early out of that block with the Air series in 2001, still a point-and-click player and distributed by the TC Group – whose Tannoy marque itself joined the party for a while with the iDP control software for both the Precision and Ellipse ranges. The Klein & Hummel brand became fully absorbed into Neumann as the KH range, and quickly combined active
nearfields with the pioneering O 500 C Digital Active Main Monitor. Even more
conservative, the current O
JBL M2 monitors launched, at NAMM this year
410 active midfield boasts a heritage dating back to
1967 and K+H’s OY, while limited controls “adapt the monitor’s response to compensate for the loudspeaker’s environment”. Where next digitally for Neumann should make interesting reading, but the biggest monitoring statement in years from JBL came last January. With the LSR concept now well established as a solution beyond the test chamber, in tandem with the MSC1 hardware controller and patented Room Mode Correction software, NAMM saw the launch of the much larger M2 Master Reference Monitor. “We saw an opportunity,”
reveals Peter Chaikin, director of recording & broadcast at JBL Professional, “especially given our long heritage in main monitors – designed by guys like Mark Gander who are still here! Everything in the chain has reached a ‘no apology’ level of excellent audio quality, but studio monitors have not evolved at the same pace. If you have the infrastructure – and a broad range of places still do – you need a progression like the M2. We’ve spent a lot of time on the interface between the speaker and the room, and we can now apply that to the unique experience you get from a large system. It was left behind when so much of the industry abandoned the purpose-built room, so the M2 takes all of our experience, together with all of our new-found knowledge of room-speaker interaction, and takes main monitoring the next level – the level it deserves.” KRK’s ERGO (Enhanced
Room Geometry Optimization) has now been around for five years, a FireWire adjunct to desktop recording and bursting
with 3D room analysis and correction algorithms. But Dan Bruck of the Stanton Group insists that the technology inside the monitoring system, whatever the speaker size, is an ally to the traditional skills of acoustic treatment, not a replacement for it. “Whatever we can do to improve the acoustics of our rooms – whether it’s new studio
construction or making an existing space as close to ‘correct’ as possible – should be done,” he says. “Using traditional methods such as bass traps or foam is a great start, but adding digital correction can get you that much closer to a perfect room and a perfect mix. With digital correction in the ERGO –no matter how much correction the room requires – you are only modifying what needs fixing. So, there is no predetermined limit on how much digital room correction is appropriate. Remember, KRK monitors are neutral; the room is not. ERGO produces the best mix for a given room, a mix that will translate better to other listening environments since it was mixed in a ‘perfect’ room.”
Dynaudio M3XE, the “ultimate main monitoring solution”
It was a quantum leap when Finnish mainstay Genelec embraced digital control some seven years ago. The 8000 series was already a desktop solution, but only added DSP in 2006 when the company had perfected a proprietary algorithm. With fully automatic calibration, the range is quite naturally accompanied by the software package Genelec Loudspeaker Manager for Small Environments but, according to marketing & public relations director Lars-Olof Janflod, main monitors for somewhat larger environments remain on the statute book.
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