Recommendations for flat studio monitors

The Studio
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Hi, I’m trying to get better at mixing and mastering since I know I’m really bad at it. After listening to my mixes on different devices (headphones, TV, etc.), I’ve come to the conclusion that the (very cheap) speakers I use just plain lie to me.

I’ve been saving up for this, and I want to get a decent pair of studio monitors. I want the ones I get to be as flat as possible. I’ve been doing some research, and within my budget, the option I’m considering is the Yamaha HS5. I’m wondering if anybody has experience with them and what they think, or if anybody can recommend another product within this price range.

Thanks in advance.

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I have used HS5s, though not regularly or for a long period (in another person’s studio during a project over several months). They were fine…I remember finding them a little overdriven and honky in the midrange to my ear, but nothing I couldn’t work with. At that price point they’re probably a fine investment. My only other experience with Yamahas were NS-10s, and that’s really apples and oranges.

It’s worth pointing out that the room always plays a huge role in the sound of speakers, and while measured flatness is admirable, there’s isn’t such a thing as a truly ‘flat sound’ from any speaker because a large amount of what you hear is determined by the acoustics of the room. If I had to pick between a cheap speakers in a well-treated room and expensive speakers in an untreated room, I’d spend the money on treatment every time (though splitting the difference with a bit of both is probably a good move). If your room isn’t treated, I doubt the HS5s would magically make everything better.

I personally use a good pair of open-back headphones for mixing, then check on various listening sources including my monitors. I do occasionally mix directly with the monitors but only for specific things and for limited periods, and at this point I know my room well enough to mix around my treatment’s weak spots.

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Cheap monitors won’t be flat. The Yamahas and the KRKs are quite coloured, particularly embellished in the mid-highs. So, when you listen to you mixes on other systems it will sound quite dull. But you learn to work with what you’ve got once your ears adjust to them.

But like @Artificer said, your room acoustics (and size/shape/materials) determine how your monitors will sound. Relying on frequency response graphs to determine what to buy is somewhat meaningless.

Ports play a big role too. Not just ported vs non-ported, but front vs rear ported. If you plan to place your monitors against near a wall and buy HS5s (rear ported), well you’re going to have very hyped bass, and your mixes will sound thin on other systems.

I use HS8’s. I don’t like the way they sound, but it’s what I’ve got. I tuned them in my room by measurement and FIR filtering…now I like the way they sound and I get better mixes. Not everyone has the ability to do that, so I recommend Sound ID Reference software and measurement mic package to tune them. Definitely well worth it. It’s not a substitute for treating room acoustics, because room modes are the biggest studio monitor performance killers. But the software and mic will cost you around $350 USD and is easy to calibrate your monitors. Yeah, it’s not cheap, but I actually purchased my software license and mic second hand from Facebook marketplace at a significant discount. So, you never know, you might get lucky.

So, my questions would be:

  1. What is the cubic footage/meters of your room?
  2. Where are you intending to place the monitors in your room?
  3. You mentioned you’ve been saving - what’s your budget?

Similar to HS5’s, my recommendations would be Kali Audio LP-6 V2 if you’re placing near a wall. JBL 305P MkII if you can get them off the wall.

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Or a killer set of planar headphones. Your can get mid-range hifiman or entry level audeze for that kind of money. Both are better than any monitors I’ve ever had access to, and are completely portable if you want to work somewhere else.

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Yeah open back Headphones are the other option. As well as what @White_Noise mentioned, Sennheiser HD650’s can be purchased on sale on Amazon every few months and are fantastic headphones.

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HD600 are what I use, my pair is over a decade old. Other than starting to look a bit shabby, they sound as good as when I got them.

My understanding is the 650s are sonically comparable with some cosmetic upgrades and I’ll likely get a pair when my current ones finally fall off my head. If they are indeed comparable to the HD600s, I’d definitely say they’re worth the price in both quality and longevity.

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Thanks, everyone, for your responses. I’ve been looking into all the products that were mentioned.

One thing I’d like to add before replying: although I’ve been making music as a hobby for a long time, I still consider myself a complete newbie when it comes to mixing and mastering. It’s something I’m actively trying to improve, which is why I decided to get some studio monitors.

Based on the reviews I’ve read, what convinced me to choose the HS5 was the idea that if you can get a mix to sound good on them, it will sound good anywhere. This is something I’ve seen repeated in several reviews. I’m not sure how reliable that claim is, though.

I honestly didn’t know much about planar or open-back headphones, thank you, that’s really helpful information. I might consider getting something like that in the future. But right now I want some audio monitors. The main reason is that I want to hear the sound moving through the air, and also I’d like to be able to listen to my mix from different positions in the room also being able to sit somebody next to me and listen to it together. That said, I’ll definitely do some more research on planar headphones before making my final decision.

@Artificer @Manton Regarding the room, I don’t have a special room set up for making music. I live in a small apartment. I have a desk space in my living room where I have my studio set up. It is quite comfortable to work at, but there is not much I can do regarding treating it specifically for audio. Also, my setup is the same I use for work, meaning I have a PC with dual boot: Ubuntu for work and Windows for music. The desk is pretty big and the space I have between it and the wall on the other side (which is actually a bookshelf) is big, so my MIDI controller and my guitars fit in. But there is a lot of space continuous to it (where I have my sofa and TV). I do understand that all of this will definitely colour the sound.

Regarding @Manton questions:

  1. What is the cubic footage/meters of your room?

I don’t have anything to measure it with, but a rough guess; and this might be way, way off, is 6.5 x 3 m. This makes a rectangle, so this rectangle is actually divided into two parts (something like two squares): the living room (where I have a small sofa and my TV) and the work area (where I have the computer and all the gear).

  1. Where are you intending to place the monitors in your room?

The monitors will be on the desk in front of me, and there will be a wall about 10–20 cm behind them.

  1. You mentioned you’ve been saving - what’s your budget?

The budget question is tricky because right now I’m living in Buenos Aires (Argentina), and there are import restrictions here. So there is some gear that is not available, and the gear that is available is usually about 25 to 40% more expensive.

I will research the Kali Audio LP-6 V2 since they will be placed right next to a wall. They are available here and though they are a little more expensive they are within my budget range. Do you have experience with them? Appart from them being front ported what other advantages do you think they have?

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The problem with everything we’re talking about is it’s complicated and the devil is in the details. It’s very hard to make generalizations about what you should buy or what you should do without knowing specifics about what you’re currently doing, what problems you’re having and what you’re trying to achieve. There are no magic bullets for these things.

Not likely. You will hear that saying thrown around a lot, but in my experience it’s very rarely true, and it’s almost certainly not true in an untreated room.

If you want speakers where that’s most likely going to happen, you want Avantone Mixcubes. You’ll hate them. You’ll hate your mixes. It will make everything you play sound awful until you understand what’s happening and fix it. Non-ported, no bass, better midrange detail than $5000 speakers even at very low volumes, and probably the closest representation to an “average” listening environment - laptop, TV, cheap headphones, stock car stereo, etc. They’re miserable, but they would absolutely make you a better mix engineer because they expose in excruciating detail the frequencies that are most prominent in music and nothing else. (I’m not actually suggesting you buy them - they’re a wonderful second set of monitors but shouldn’t be your only ones).

Colour is not the problem. The issue is in an untreated room you get resonances/standing waves that cause pressure zones and thus cancellations and build up. That means you simply won’t hear some frequencies and others will be amplified, and turning up the volume only makes it worse. This is true of cheap and expensive speakers alike as it’s just the physics of sound in a space. It’s exactly why many home producers use headphones as a primary method of mixing and monitors as a secondary, because most of us are in the same position as you, a multi-use space that can’t be rearranged and fitted specifically for music production.

A couple of things you can do to help your situation would be mix at lower volumes (not nearly as fun, I know) to minimize the effect of the room, and use reference tracks to compare frequency/spectrographs between what you’re doing/hearing and a track you’re very familiar with.

As to purchases, my advice would be to buy the HS5s, or something similar (Kali, JBL). There’s no stand out model in that price range that’s going to be miles better than the other options. Then get a decent pair of headphones. I’m on record liking Sennheisers, but in a pinch something like Superlux 668Bs would be fine as a second listening source. Pair the headphones with some DSP correction software - REW (free but very good), Sonarworks, ARC, etc. All of them should have profiles for most common headphones and will give you a nice flat reference to compare to your speakers.

Ultimately, the most important thing you can do is listen and practice - make a mix, listen to it lots of places, make notes, make changes, re-listen in those same places and see how things changed. No set of equipment and environment is perfect; learning what you have and building up an intuition for how to mix just takes time and practice.

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I’d say those reviews of HS5’s are missing some context, and without that context, it sounds like they will make your mixes sound good anywhere.

The HS5 is sort of similar to an NS-10. It doesn’t sound particularly pleasing, it lacks bass and high frequency accuracy. It’s all mids, somewhat similar to a Avantone Mixcube. The Mixcube’s frequency response is absolutely rubbish but it’s designed that way to mimic small speaker systems like Bluetooth and phone speakers. It’s built as a reference or “B” monitor. Something you’d have set up as a secondary set of monitors.

For someone who is learning to mix, and learning your own ears, that is a hard road ahead. It’s like if you learned to drive in a shitbox manual car with a worn clutch, 2nd gear is missing teeth and it’s got no power steering. You will learn it’s quirks and pitfalls and become good at driving no doubt (those of us in the over 40 club have all been there). BUT after years of driving this car you step into an automatic, modern healthy car and it feels like a dream to drive, it’s so easy, like where have you been all my life?

For you to be able to reference low end accurately you’d need a sub paired with HS5’s. But then you may as well just get HS7’s or 8’s. I don’t recommend getting a sub for mixing because if you set its gain and crossover incorrectly then your mixes still wont translate well. Better to buy bigger monitors in my opinion.

Being in your living room is more likely a good thing as all your furniture and knick-knacks will act as diffusers, scatterers and absorbers. Curtains are good if you have them.

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@ForPsyDef I realized you never mentioned what you’re using for monitors now. Knowing that might give us a better idea of what you’re used to and what might be an upgrade.

@Manton and I rambled about rooms and whatnot, and it’s all correct, but at the same time no setup is perfect and everyone has limitations they’re working with, even big professional studios. We were mostly trying to make you aware that new monitors aren’t going to immediately fix everything because there are other things involved (that will persist with whatever new monitors you buy), but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t upgrade.

If you’re using consumer speakers or very cheap monitors, they probably are not flat, and getting a decent set of entry level “good” monitors will be a big help. It won’t fix the room issues, but they’ll be easier to identify and either correct or learn to work around them.

The important thing is knowledge - you need to know what you’re hearing is mostly correct and what frequency ranges you aren’t hearing correctly and just be aware of the problem. Getting equipment you can trust is the first part, the second is experimentation and practice.

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@Artificer @Manton thanks a lot for the responses, I`m learning a lot.

To put things in perspective of why I want to upgrade my current set up I’ll give an example. When I first got into music I got a very cheap no brand guitar and played around with it for a bit, learned some songs, chords, scales, then a year later when I was like “Ok I enjoy this, and I’m spending a lot of time doing it” I got a decent guitar. Of course then it was a long trip where I practiced a lot and dived deeper into music theory. But in the end I developed a fairly decent relative pitch, I’m not Rick Beato but when I hear a piece I immediately can tell if it’s in major or minor or one of the modes, there are chord changes I immediately recognize, etc.

When got into sound design I did the same thing, first I started playing around with the synthesizers in reason, reading some manuals and then one day I said ¨Ok, let´s dive deeper into this¨ so I got a copy of synthorial, got all type of analysis plugins, researched different types of synthesis. Now, even though I´m not near as good as I would like in recognizing sounds I do hear certaing things like when a sound has a filter moving, I also understand what´s an LFO, ADSR, etc.

I´m at the same stage with mixing/mastering where I´ve been playing around with mixes for a while, doing things like you said mixing at different volumes, trying in different speakers (TV, standard sony bluetooth usb speakers), and now I want to get better, but to get better I need some better (not fully professional, just decent) setup. I do understand that developing my ears is going to be a long journey.

I have a pair of Thonet & Vander small computer speakers (that are 10 years old) and a pair of standard (not studio) JBL bluetooth headphones.

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lol we really should have asked what you were using. Yes, upgrade. Anything in that HS5 price range is going to be a massive upgrade in terms of flatness and fidelity. I’m guessing it will be a night and day difference.

I would still suggest you get a decent pair of headphones - most of the room problems will have to do with bass, and the speakers we’ve talked about have will poor bass curves due to size and design. A sub is an option, but I agree with Manton that you probably don’t want to go that direction (if only because of additional cost). Even if you only use the headphones to mix the low end, I think they’d be a valuable addition to give you a truer picture of the bass and allow youthe flexibility to A/B your mix.

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At the moment I use a pair of Sennheiser HD560s, and they’re great. If you’ve got the money get some 600s/650s but senns are always my favourite. You could also consider Audiotechnica headphones, too.

Monitors are something I don’t have, but I have quite a few friends that use KRK Rokit 6 monitors. I’m geared for bass music and hardcore, so I know they work best for that, but maybe not so good for what you use. When it comes to any mixing equipment you can really use anything that’s not designed to be “flashy.” Like airpods, for example.

I used to have cheap wired headphones and would compromise by just carving huge gaps out of EQs, so if you can try bringing some music to a store and ask them if you can use the headphones.

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I used a pair of AKG K612 Pro headphones before I got my HD650’s. I still love them. Super comfortable. I don’t recall ever getting ear fatigue and the response is very neutral. Also, on the cheaper side money wise.

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this.

also check this out

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yeah those a cool and all but they are way over priced. Especially since you can run a plugin on your master bus or system output that essentially does the same thing. And you don’t need to use unbalanced connections in the process.

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way overpriced yes.

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You just bought one didn’t you.

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bro. i use a paper clip to hold my tweeter in place (works great).. no i didn’t buy it.

I used the SPLnFFT app on my iphone ($5) to calibrate my monitors to match for theatrical SPL. it worked just fine & sounds great!

Here’s a link to the app for iphone if you are interested:

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Ohh OK.

I just calibrated a real 7.1 cinema to reference level. It blew the tits off me. One of the best sounding cinemas I’ve been to ever, actually. Not to toot my own horn, but I am a trumpet player, or saxophone, depending on who you talk to.

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