I'm quite familiar with a wide range of high-end studio headphones, but i'm much less familiar with studio monitors. So, what do you guys own or use? What do you recommend? I own a pair of near-field Alesis M1 Active MkII. It seems like they're "value" monitors, which means they're mediocre-sounding (in the studio monitors league) but they didn't punch a hole in my wallet. http://alesis.com/products/m1active/ They're bi-amplified and, yes, that you can tell: the transition between the bass cone and the treble bullet is smooth and there are no out-of-phase artifacts. There's no smearing like with passive filters on the output high-current lines. They're a bit bass-heavy and i actually think they're intentionally made like that. Alesis has a weird recommendation in the manual, saying that you should plug one of the holes with a cloth if bass is too fat, or even both holes if bass is waaay too big. I kinda feel that they intended them to typically have one hole plugged at all times. That's something for a bass-control knob to adjust, i know, but for the price ($400) i guess i have no right to complain. It's actually very weird how such a small bass cone can deliver so well at such low frequencies. Even if i turn up the volume, they're still crisp and controlled. I never turned it up into the distortion zone, my neighbours are not exactly fans of electronic music. :-) Treble is good, but definitely not as transparent as, say, high-end Beyerdynamic or Sennheiser phones. They're a bit harsh and lack sparkle (although certain narrow bands in the mid-high i'm pretty sure are actually over-emphasized), but not too much. I didn't see a frequency response graph yet, but i'm pretty sure there's a "noodle" with all kinds of curls in the treble zone. Nothing impossible to live with, it's just that it feels like it's there. Midrange is ok, but not remarquable in any way. It's not too quiet or anything, it's just that it's kinda tasteless. I keep them in my bedroom (no laughs please) and actually they're close to a corner (ok, now you're allowed to laugh). No, the fat bass is not because of that, they're fat anyway (but the corner may make the situation worse - i'll have to fix that one day). The ideal listening zone is ok, if not exactly too big. If the two monitors and my head are making a triangle 2 meters (6 feet) across, the ideal zone is the size of a medium-to-small beach ball. I can use them to fill a room with sound and they're still ok. Not studio-monitor-ok (they're barely that in the ideal zone), but hifi-speaker-ok. That's odd for such small boxes. I don't know enough about monitors to tell whether this is typical for near-fields or not. I know it would be typical for mid-fields, not to mention main monitors. Now the inquisitive comments: I'll be curious to hear how Alesis' flagship ProLinear 820 DSP sound like, just to compare them with my M1 Active MkII. But, well, Alesis is not the best in the field of monitors, so i'm not too worried about that. I've heard some people saying that the Adam monitors are the best thing since sliced bread (especially the mid-fields and above, such as the S3A). Quote: "more accurate than most high-end headphones" which i find hard to believe. Anyone using them? The technology certainly looks interesting. http://www.adam-audio.com/ Also, i've heard a lot about Genelec, but never had a chance to listen to them. Comments? How about Mackie? -- Florin Andrei http://florin.myip.org/
