28 l December 2013
www.prosoundnewseurope.com
studiofeature Electro-acoustics remains first
and foremost an electro-mechanical enterprise: Event’s new 2030 is the company’s first three-way studio monitoring system, featuring three discrete drivers, a new wave guide assembly and a 3.5-inch cone transducer with a pressed pulp and polypropylene cone.
UNITED IN THEIR FIELD In the UK, three brands would argue that main monitors never really went away. While they have embraced self-powered nearfield – Quested’s S and V series cover both midfield and nearfield, passive and active, PMC’s desktops are active and digitally amplified by third party partner Flying Mole and ATC has its dedicated Amp Pack – the emphasis remains on electro- acoustic ‘purity’. The other buzzword is
‘neutrality’. Quested’s electronics concern amplification, not digital control, with special dispensation from the corporate partnership with UK power pioneer MC2. And while the largest passive monitor HQ210 whispers of DSP upgrades, they concern only crossover control and amp channels. Similarly, PMC stresses ‘transparency’ and ‘neutral balance’ with no recourse to software: the IB2S-A model has ‘DSP control’, but only for crossovers and time alignment to the drivers.
At the top of the range are the BB5 XBD-Actives, used in highly demanding recording, mixing and mastering applications. “We keep a close eye on trends in speaker design, and we’ve noticed that there’s something of a gap at the large-scale active end of the market,” comments Oliver Thomas, R&D project manager
(aboat PMC. “The current products at that level from the major players are all getting somewhat long in the tooth, most of them don’t have digital inputs and they don’t really make use of any of the recent innovations in speaker design techniques. For example, they don’t offer much in the way of resolution, compared to what can now be attained with good Class D amp design and DSP-aided crossover management.
“This led us to create a new design project which we’re now calling the 4X10; it incorporates some of the recent transmission line design advances we’ve made with our IB2 midfields and the twotwo nearfields, and benefits from the detailed driver performance analyses we’ve been undertaking in collaboration with the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, using laser techniques to model the driver output. These have enabled us to make some very fine changes to our new designs which have squeezed that critical extra few percent of performance out of them. “The other aspect we thought
was a bit lacking is excitement,” opines Thomas. “A lot of the larger monitors on the market today are either very ‘vibey’ monitors that make things sound good when you’re tracking but aren’t very reliable, or pure reference tools that aren’t much fun to work with. We’ve noticed that a lot of engineers will track with one monitor, and then mix or master with another. The 4X10 is designed to do both jobs. “This project isn’t designed to
replace our BB5 monitor – that remains as our flagship for professionals who prefer a pure analogue approach. But in this day and age, we felt the market
Amadeus monitors at Studio de la Chine, Paris
years,” he says. “Every product starts with a set of transducers engineered by ourselves to have a very linear frequency response free from high Q resonances, smooth roll-off and low distortion components. This helps to make system design simpler and results, we think, in a more accurate system. Obviously the amplifiers driving the transducers also have to be of the highest performance, and in this area we haven’t found any reason to stray from the Class A/B designs we’ve been using for some time. We feel efficient digital amplifiers have their place, but not in high-
Genelec 1238A, launched at IBC2013
could benefit from a modern, large-scale, high-resolution monitor with digital and analogue inputs. We couldn’t find one, so we built the 4X10! Metropolis Studios seem to agree with us, as they’re now putting the 4X10 through its paces in their new recording room.” ATC’s R&D guru Ben Lilly pulls no punches at all. “Our current philosophy hasn’t changed really over the past 30
ROCK SOLID IN GREECE
Kostas Kalimeris is often referred to as ‘the’ guy in Greek studio circles, with an Athens studio and several Eurovision Song Contests under his engineering belt. Now of course we can add Black Rock Studios (above) on the island of Santorini to his industry
dowry, and its classic inventory of SSL J Series, Genelec 1035B monitors and outboard racks filled with Neve, GML, Manley, Avalon and Focusrite. With typical honesty, Kalimeris admits that the main monitors saw far less action the nearfields during his first
two years of business – but that, he says with some satisfaction, has all changed. “This last year the main monitors have absolutely come into their own, making me really happy with the investment! We’ve had several clients book the facility – including the French band Kassav and the German rapper Sido – expressly to use the 1035Bs, which I knew I wanted for this studio from my long experience of Genelecs in Athens, Paris and elsewhere.
“Going active with the monitors provides enough electronics, which was Genelec’s great contribution. If you’ve got the room right – and ours was designed by Recording Architecture – DSP does not figure in the monitoring at all.”
www.blackrock-studios.com
performance, full range studio monitoring systems.”
MAIN STREAM The sense of a heritage to be protected is not confined to the UK. “The philosophy of PSI Audio can be compared to Swiss watch designers,” said former PSI international sales manager Marc Chablaix of his native monitor brand, while in India Ashoke Mukherjee regards the SM series of studio monitors from the portfolio of loudspeaker manufacturer Sonodyne as the result of “studying in detail the effect of cabinet vibration” rather than “push-button solutions”. Two frontiers might create new
avenues into digital control, however. Firstly, custom jobs – where the bespoke solution becomes a new norm. “We worked many times with African artist Youssou N’Dour, to develop specific high-power monitoring systems for his Dakar recording studios,” says Michel Deluc, director of R&D at French companyAmadeus. “These systems were then adopted by several Paris studios, and there are many innovating projects to come.” And secondly, corporate synergy. Given the obvious
dynamics within the TC Group, it might almost be difficult for distributed monitor brand Dynaudio Professional to avoid DSP: the “ultimate main monitoring solution” M3XE already takes the exquisite driver and cabinet technology of Dynaudio and unites it with signal processing and amplification from stablemates
Lab.gruppen and Lake. The 3-way monolith has two
Lab.gruppen PLM10000Q amplifiers on board along with Lake active crossover processing, suggesting another space to watch. But for now the watchword is caution, best espoused by Roland Stenz, founder of Berlin-based Eve Audio. “All our models have DSP inside, but we really want them to behave like a traditional analogue studio monitor,” he says. “So we don’t have any room correction or presets; the DSP is used for the filtering, specifically to simulate analogue filtering. It provides very exact volume control, for example: one dB means one dB! The tolerances are as precise as any normal potentiometer. Room correction only deals effectively with low frequencies, anyway: if you programme some correction for the tweeter section, you can’t usually move your head more than a couple of centimetres.” The SC408 4-way 8-inch active
is currently Eve Audio’s largest model, a midfield rather than a main, so it defines the state of the market very well: overall, the reach of DSP is limited by the very challenges that main monitors seek to address.
www.amadeus-audio.com www.dynaudioprofessional.com www.eve-audio.com www.eventelectronics.com www.genelec.com www.jblpro.com www.krksys.com www.neumann.com www.pmc-speakers.com www.psiaudio.com www.quested.com www.sonodyne.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60