Speakers

i would suggest,
not buying now,
but saving your money up for a while,
and investing in a nicer set of monitors...
 
the really cheap ones are not going to do you any favors.
 

batsbrew
i would suggest,
not buying now,
but saving your money up for a while,
and investing in a nicer set of monitors...
 
the really cheap ones are not going to do you any favors.
 

Agreed. Save for a while and get a more worthy pair. You'll be glad if you do that.

Don't forget the second-hand option. Used studio monitors are typically in like-new condition because they've been sitting in the same spot for years and not abused. Used studio monitors are also plentiful, at least at the entry-level end of the scale, because most users eventually want to upgrade from whatever they started with.
 
Being in the UK, watch eBay for a pair of Tannoys to show up. They're decent speakers for the price - especially the entry-level Reveal line. Try to save up for the ones with the 8" woofer. You should be able to get a pair second-hand for less than £250.
 
Another option would be to invest in some high-quality headphones while you're saving up for speakers. You've already got enough money for some pretty good AKG, Sennheiser or Beyerdynamic cans.

Thanks bitflippe for the advice. We do trawl the auction sites looking for secondhand kit but monitor speakers really do seem to hold their price. We do have a fair pair of headphones and the interface has two headphone outs so we can both listen which is nice.
 
Bats brew, why do you suggest not to go two big on the woofers? I thought that bigger the better and what do you recommend for room treatments.
 
Thanks

Andi,
 
8-inch woofers and such do replicate the lower (longer) bass waves better - that 32 on organs and minimoogs is the length of the wave itself, which is hard to unfold in a 12 ft. room. ;-)  A smaller woofer produces a smaller bass wave, which doesn't bounce around so much in a smaller room.  For listening it doesn't matter so much, but for critical mixing it is like trying to work under muddy water.
 
Room treatments range from having rugs (that you can take up) on wooden floors to a bed in the mix room.  A 12 X 12 room is going to have a lot of reflections - both bass and top end.  Top end is easier to dull w/ rugs and heavier curtains, etc.  A bed or any big soft object is going to absorb both high and some low end.  Think how a room sounds w/o furniture in it.  The cheapest method of low end absorption is to get rock wool (here in the US you can get Home Depot or any such store to order sheets of it), wrap it in fabric  and hang it in corners .  For <$100 you can get enough to help balance a smaller room, esp. with curtains and such (there is more to it than that but not necessarily much more).  There is lots of info on how to home studio building on the internet.
 
@
 
 

andi
Thanks, as impatient as I am to get something now I can see how waiting a while may save me bucks later. You mention KRK and I have been looking at Rokit RP6 G3 which here in the UK sell for about £280 (about $432) I will try and find the equivalent in the JBL range.

My advice: don't go Rokit!  I regret the purchase, as I've experienced multiple failures in each speaker.  I still need to troubleshoot and fix the severe crackling and popping in both speakers.  I don't even care anymore really.  Most of my creating, mixing, and listening in done in a good pair headphones.  If I want to listen again, I play it in the car on the way to work.  I know this isn't the best of techniques, but I am just a hobbyist with a crappy pair of Rokit speakers!

bitflipper
 
 
Being in the UK, watch eBay for a pair of Tannoys to show up. They're decent speakers for the price - especially the entry-level Reveal line.

 
I like my Reveal 5a's. Just had a quick look on EBay and there's a pair in 'as new' condition for £108.00.

Thank you thank you thank you for all your comments. I have two more questions that may seem a bit strange. For some reason it can work out cheaper to buy two single speakers than a pair. Do they have to be a matched pair or is it OK to buy two identical make/models.
 
The other question is frequency response. What range should I be looking at for monitor speakers. A pair I was looking at had a frequency response of 45hz - 56khz so I wondered what that meant.

andi
The other question is frequency response. What range should I be looking at for monitor speakers. A pair I was looking at had a frequency response of 45hz - 56khz so I wondered what that meant.

Those frequency response charts are almost useless, to the point where you can pretty much ignore them.
 
They are made in an unrealistic anechoic environment, only show on-axis response, and tell you nothing about how frequency response varies as they heat up. Furthermore, manufacturers regularly take liberties with the facts to make their products look better on paper, e.g. claiming 20-20k without including dB levels, or showing a graph with unrealistic Y-axis gradations of 10 or 20 dB. Better to just pay no mind to them lest you be misled.
 
Even cheap speakers have no problem reproducing frequencies up to 20 KHz, the limit of human hearing. The main differentiator is the low end, which is mainly determined by the physical size of the woofer and the enclosure it's in.
 
Ideally, you'll want to have speakers that are flat (-3dB) down to 40 Hz, but that usually means either 10" or 15" woofers or adding a subwoofer. On a budget, you'll be lucky to get a flat response down to 55 Hz, maybe 50 Hz with 8" woofers. Beware of ported speakers that use an acoustical trick to artificially boost the extreme low end, but cause unevenness in the process. 
 
One set  of published numbers you can (kind of) rely on are the enclosure's physical dimensions. As a general rule, the bigger the box the better. Of course, a cheap unit with a huge enclosure won't beat a high-end compact enclosure, but all other factors being equal, go with the larger box. Weight is significant, too. The better speakers are surprisingly heavy, due to their large magnets and the density of the material the enclosures are made from.

Without treatment your room is always going to be too bassy. Your room is an extension of your speakers and unless you take care of that you could have $5000 speakers and not improve your mixes. By that I mean that your mix will sound fine in your room but won't sound very good on other systems in other environments.

A very basic rule of thumb is that your listening position (your head) and your speakers should form an equilateral triangle so if your speakers are 8' apart, consider your mixing position if you now sit 8' from both of your speakers. Studio monitors are considered near field usually thus you are hearing more of the direct sound radiating from the speaker than room reflections. The further from your speakers the more of your rooms characteristics will enter the sound field. Five to six feet will be much better, even less if you can manage it.

Being a square room you're going have plenty enough problems.

hi thank you for your input, very interesting. My desk is 8ft long so that is the max I can have them apart at the moment. It means that I will be sitting 4ft away which is a tad uncomfortable. I am sorry I did mean sound treatment and not sound proofing.