I've got a pair of Alesis M1 Active and a pair of Mackie HR824. I love the Alesis because they are cheap and tougher than nails. Mine have been abused to no end for about four or five years. I can mix on these things until my eyes fall out. I do not like the HR824 monitors. Despite Mackie's claims that these things have built in protection for every concievable problem they don't-that's my experience. I have never abused these monitors and they are not used very often. One day I'm doing very moderate level listening and one of them blows. These are expensive monitors, I think they sound dynamite but I don't trust them. It pisses me off because I'm afraid to use them. When I purchased the HR824 I compared them to about eight other leading studio monitor manufacturers products--I'm not talking about the super high end stuff. The comparisons were all done in the same room. I used a half dozen CDs with million dollar productions. Hands down, they sound better than all the others. I was really impressed by how bad some monitors sounded. There's a couple monitor manufacturers getting very good reviews but their product is garbage. A little research revealed that these manufacturers are not audio experts, they are video experts designing audio monitors. Phreak the chains, ride the trains, why not you, why not me, choosing monitors is a crazy lottery, you spin, you win, you loose, you choose; blah:blah, blah:blah, blah, blop! ron --- Chris Pickett <chris.pickett(a)mail.mcgill.ca> wrote: __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Vote for the stars of Yahoo!'s next ad campaign! http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/yahoo/votelifeengine/

--- Steve Harris <S.W.Harris(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote: Did you notice a loss of volume in the cabinet that's bad? I have one that's -5db from the other. Or maybe the loud one is actually getting better with time and the other one will eventually begin to improve too. Ya think? Hey, if one is beyound repair (probably dictated by cost of repair vs purchase of new) then the good one is your Center for surround. Haven't we vascilated long enough within a surroundless world? I never turn mine off. I turn my DM-24 off because its power supply is a veritable hot dog broiler. It's been several years so I don't recall much of what my business partners and I learned. The one brand was Blue Moon or Blue Oyster Moon Cult or some such name. As I recall, they included a sub or sub and center speaker or something. A friend recommended them. I listened to them at another friend's pro audio retail store and compared them with a bunch of other models. I'm not shy about giving my critique and asking questions about anything I'm gonna buy. After subjecting the store owner/friend to Chinese water drip torture, he named two or three of the brands we listened to and said they were designed by video companies and suggested that we not purchase those products. While my two partners and I did the right thing, we still ended up with junk--Mackie HR824. Maybe the only thing I've learned is that I'd aproach another purchase decision the same way and hope for better luck next time. Another thing, the fact that M1 Actives don't sound as awesome as the HR824 is one small factor in a list of events and products that determines quality of final product. Cheap monitors don't dictate that final product sucks anymore than great monitors always produce awesome results. I like reading about Paul Winkler's discovery of alternative monitors. It makes perfect sense to me. OK, am I gonna get more business because I own $4,000.00 monitors? Twenty years of experience tells me the answer is a resounding no. Nobody cares what kind of monitors I use as long as the master sounds great in their car. Well, my rant is beginning to smell of moon shine. ron "the anticonsumer" parker __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail

--- Mark Knecht <mknecht(a)controlnet.com> wrote: Let's thank our lucky stars that the era of Yamaha NS10 monitors is behind us so we don't have to suffer hearing fatique or explain things that way anymore or is that as much as before. Or something. ahhh! You, me and everyone else including Katz. ron __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Vote for the stars of Yahoo!'s next ad campaign! http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/yahoo/votelifeengine/

On Thu, 2004-07-22 at 18:31, Florin Andrei wrote: Well, till we finally got those Adams (it took us a long time) we had 8 Ramsas PA speakers with huge old clunky external Yamaha amps... Well, we have a couple of money trees in the yard (not very big), we just go out when they are ready, climb on ladders and harvest the bigger notes, we don't bother with the 20's, ha ha ha :-) Funding for anything is definitely not easy... And of mine. We got those for our main teaching space which also acts as a small concert space. We wanted the best we could get, but funds were not unlimited, that's why we did not get eight S3As (there are _always_ more expensive speakers). Don't misunderstand me, the Mackies are really good. One odd thing is that at some point we did some > 20KHz tests and the Mackies had a _spike_ above 20K... very weird. -- Fernando

On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 14:47, Frank Barknecht wrote: Correct. And I _still_ want them all :-) -- Fernando

On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 11:44, Jamie Guinan wrote: I take it that you have played around with the "space" switch (or something like that). I think they have a bit of a resonance at the _very_ low end. I mixed a piece on them that has some nice very low end "booms" in there and on most other speakers they are really not there. -- Fernando

--- Jamie Guinan <guinan(a)bluebutton.com> wrote: Your room probably needs some accoustical design work. To build a standing bass wave a minimum amount of square footage needs to exist, (I forget the amount). Otherwise, you won't hear the bass and you will artificially boost it in your mixes. Then when you play it back in a car or wherever and the mixes will be very bass heavy. I think one other issue is wave cancelation but I'm not so sure about this. Assume a 12 foot long room with source against one wall. Cancelation will occur where the waves meet which is at six feet. So, you don't want to locate the mixing chair in the cancelation zone. DISCLAIMER: I haven't thought about accoustical design for awhile so what follows is just a primer and probably a bit inaccurate. It should be enough to give you a sense of the challange. Everytime I design a room, I have to relearn this stuff. :) Ideally you meet the requirement for square footage. Then you decide what the appropriate room reverberation is. At this point, you're concerned with total square footage and sabin values for existing materials. Then begins the math for which we use formulas in a spreedsheet that someone helped us put together. The first thing you find is the current room condition; equalization and reverberation responses. Then you introduce X amount of square footage of absorption to adjust the responses within about six frequency bands beginning at 20Hz and going to about 5kHz. So, for example, you target sabin values per band and by introducing 80 square feet of four inch thick Ownes Corning Accoustical Insulation (forget the product number) you become acceptably close to the target value. Of course that adjustment could negatively affect one of the other frequency bands. Basically you experiment with balancing the amounts of materials and absorption to get the close as possible to the target values. Perhaps the higher bands need to be tamed so you introduce 80 square feet of four inch ownens corning but you cover it with peg board so that only the high band frequencies penetrate into the absorption material. This module is likely to be on the ceiling. The question is, how does buying anyone's prebuilt bass traps figure into this. The traps obviously treat frequencies but you've got to know what your room requires. It's definitely not arbitrary. So, unless someone selling traps knows the values of your room and what you're going to use the room for they aren't providing you with anything that you can't design yourself. You can design a room through experimentation but that takes time and you're always a bit unsure of what's happening in the mixes. That's not a killer until you do work for hire and someone comes back and says, "the mix sounds like ass." Speaking from experience, that really sucks. If you don't want to do the math, I'd suggest calling around until you find the Owens Corning product and then build your own modules. Design them in four x foor foot profiles and so they can be installed in different rooms. That way you can take them with when you move. Removable modules also enable you to change the accoustics of a room; imagine, a dead room vocal both becoming a live percussion room. A great feature for limited spaces. Somewhere in my empire of junk, I've got photographs from the last studio that my partner and I designed and built. They show construction strategies for sound containment. There's room drawings and the accoustical design spreedsheets. The variables are only for basic cube shapes because we weren't dealing with angels and diffusion. If anyone actually needs this stuff, I'll put forth the effort to find it. ron __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, R Parker wrote: [ I get it now: a standing wave is where it builds up, but I was experiencing cancellation ] I think cancellation is the main problem, while the corners are building up energy. <snip primer> Thanks for the primer, that was very helpful! I'll try and do some measurements before I go investing in anything. The first thing I think I need to do move my system that the speakers are facing in the longer dimension of the room (its a finished basement, roughly 15x30ft, carpeted floor, fiberglass tile ceiling with insulation above it). -Jamie p.s. As a token gesture toward on-topicness, I'm driving all this with a Delta66 on Linux (2.6.7 - yes I've felt the latency problems, meaning to try Ingo or whoever's patches). Just learning my way around Ardour and other tools, good stuff...

On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 11:44, Jamie Guinan wrote: It is not unusual for untreated cubical rooms to exhibit a dead bass zone right in the center. -- Florin Andrei http://florin.myip.org/

lol! just goes to show you are right about subjectivity. Krk seem to take a different approach, emphasising openness and detail over flat frequency response. The ear can compensate for frequency bumps in a way which is not possible with other defects. Their models vary a lot but i would count myself as a fan. the only good advice is never to take advice on speakers:-) cheers -- Tim Orford

Version 2.7.0 of the musical score editor NoteEdit is available: http://rnvs.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/~jan/noteedit/noteedit.html New features: + Arbitraty text ("Allegro", "Adagio" ,...) o it is exported to all typesetters. Unfortunatly, the PMX export gives bad results. Perhaps a PMX guru could review the NoteEdit output and tell me what's wrong o Please prefer the build-in markers, if any! For example: Never use the text tool for D. S. al Fine! Use the Segno signs instead. The reason is: NoteEdit ignores every text during replay. In contrast: The Segno signs control the replay. + Triplet recognition from MIDI file + The snap distance selection (MIDI import) is back (again). -- J.Anders, Chemnitz, GERMANY (ja(a)informatik.tu-chemnitz.de)