williamredpath
New member
Hi guys
I had a discussion on the forums briefly about the difference between PC speakers and studio monitors after someone entitled a thread (Corsair SP2500 - amazing). After chatting to a few guys on the topic it was quite apparent that quite a few of you guys seemed interested in what your listening to wether it's in a game or a video, or music. After the discussion I said I would write a thread on the different speaker systems and the advantages and disadvantages of each of them so people have a little insight to what's out there in terms of the different options they have in order to suit their listening needs. Now just a little about myself so people understand that i'm not just a music enthusiast giving an opinion. I am a musician of nearly 15 years professional experience who has studied sound in many different forms
for nearly 26 years of my life since i was 5. I have over 23,000 albums from virtually every era in music and virtually every genre of music that exists. I am a professional instrumentalist who currently serves in her majesties Royal
Marines Band who has travelled a large portion of the world with my job. I have also composed and arranged music for many concerts and worked with sound effects and sound production for many concerts and shows.
Now since I joined the forums I am now currently on my third build and along the way the videos that Tom has made along with reading up on many of the forum threads and asking for advice has helped me greatly as building rigs is still a bit of a rolling education for me. I feel that as so many of you guys have helped me it would be good for me to give something back, and sharing a little of my knowledge in speaker systems seems a good way to do that as it's something that is often the thing that is considered after people have built their dream rigs.
Now this isn't going to be a thread throwing a whole load of frequency numbers out at people, just a bit of history and a few descriptions followed by some pros and cons and a conclusion. Telling people frequency numbers isn't really the point of this as people in the main aren't interested in that so i'll leave that for another discussion.
Ok lets start back at the beginning because it's important that we understand how any speaker system has developed over time. Now believe it or not it might suprise some people to know that music was being recorded before general sounds, infact as far back as the ninth century, first in the form of writing symbols which progressed to numbers and finally to notation. The
very first mechanical musical device was created by the Banu Musa brothers in the ninth century which was a hydropowered organ which operated through a system of cylinders and pins. Now I could be guilty of going off topic by giving you all a whole load of pre-history talking about devices such as the Phonautograph, phonograph, grammophone and various other devices
so i'll stop there with that and cut to the chase of what we're here to really know about and that is current speaker systems. I just thought I would share a tiny amount on the the history to explain how far back humans have thought about sound and music. So from the ninth century i'll jump to the 1920's when studio monitors were in the ascendancy of their life. Studio monitors actually started of as speakers designed to pick up interference and obvious productional problems instead of being used to musically evaluate mixes and tracks in an artistic sense. Basically practically all music was recorded live so if the producer considered the recording adequate without interference it was deemed acceptable. Also the bands and artists of the time such as the Paul Whiteman band and Duke Ellington were recorded entirely using only 1 microphone between the entire band through 1 single channel, unlike today where a whole host of microphones and channels are
used depending on the ensemble. Early monitors were basic loudspeaker wooden cabinets whilst the high end state of the art speakers of that time were very large horn operated systems used in the film industry mainly in cinemas during that time. Those larger systems developed over the 1920's and 30's to try and refine issues the speaker companies faced in regards to
cinema sound back then. As a result of the development due to demand by the cinema industry the shearer horn was developed and was considered the industry standard in the mid 1930's. In the 1940's the first high end speaker developed to be a studio monitor was made. This was the Altec Lansing 604 and it's drivers were the work of James bullough Lansing who had supplied the
the drivers for the Shearer horn in the 30's. The 604 took over as the industry standard and remained that way for around 25 years. It also went through no fewer than 11 modifications and upgrades during that 25 year period. The 604 went out of production in the late 90's despite losing it's status as the industry standard nearer the end of the 60's. The 604 could be
seen in almost every studio in the United States during it's tenure. Europe however had a similar set of monitors in the tannoy dual concentric monitors and they were as popular in Europe as the 604's were in the US. Altec lansing did however make a mistake in releasing what was supposed to be a successor to the 604 in 1959 with the 605 duplex. The 605 monitors were heavily critisised by recording companies and never really made much impact to the tried and trusted 604's, however it did leave the reputation of Altec Lansing slightly tainted which eventually led to major recording companies such as Capitol Records and EMI changing their monitors to the JBL D50 monitors with other companies following suit towards the late 60's. Ultimately
The 604's became more obsilete in the late 60's with recording becoming less live and more multi tracking was introduced. At the end of the 60's heading into the 70's JBL became the worlds leader in monitor production with 2 particular sets of monitor. they were the 4320 and 4310 monitors. the 4320 monitors would soon be taking the lead in industry standard status until the 4310 took over as a phenominon. The 4310 changed the way in which recording studios worked by making producers work more at close range to the monitors in order to pick up every detail of their charts tracks and mixes due to the monitors being much smaller in size. The rule was to measure the distance between the monitors and form a perfect triangle between the 2 monitors and the record producer in order to hear the track being produced perfectly. This is still the widely used method in todays recording studios. The main reason for this is during the mid to late 70's when the band the WHO used a dozen JBL4350 monitors capable of 125db each and 2 15inch sub woofers and a 12 inch mid bass driver started a trend in the music of the time with the introduction of the behemoth monitor which was soon considered too crude. A new trend had to be decided upon and in 1978 the introduction of the Yamaha ns10 monitors began it's life as the top choice monitor. Now the Yamaha NS10's didn't start life how you would have thought, infact it's had a pretty difficult start to it's existance. Initially the NS10's were described as horrible due to the fact that they are too brutally honest for their own good. They were small in form and pretty inexpensive. But due to there very clear, flat response they were probably the best monitors for mixers and recording artists due to all the inaccuracies they highlight in people's mixes and tracks. Also part of the NS10's poor start to life was they originally build as household hi-fi speakers and many people didn't like their sound due to them showing their music in it's raw state rather than a produced state, which leads me on to the main difference between PC speakers and monitors in terms of what people are actually hearing.
When you are considering speakers for your PC it's important to establish what it is you will be doing on your computer wether it's writing music, playing games or just listening to your music library. There are many different factors to understand here in terms of setup, cost, and most importantly the sound you get from undertaking specific tasks.
Ok lets look at what the difference between speakers monitors and PC speakers are.
There are a few types of PC speaker, they are speakers such as the Bose companion 3 which is designed for people who enjoy music in a casual sense and general family use. They connect via USB and produce a sound through a digital medium. They are fairly expensive and produce a metalic quality to their sound when to close to a user. They are designed for 5.1 encoded media, games and music order to give the illusion of surround sound by spreading the sound out more but it becomes too aparent that there
is a flaw that when playing lower quality music in your chosen media player, particularly if playing through itunes. Another type are 2.1 auxillary and PC port satelite speakers, and companies such as logitech are fairly prominant in that market. fairly recently Corsair come up with their SP2500 which they say is a gaming set of PC speakers. Now having listened to them and many
other brands such as logitech, Klipsch, JBL, I have to say they all serve more than enough purpose as music, media and gaming speakers with the SP2500 probably in the whole doing the best job overall. Now all the PC/laptop speakers mentioned above are engineered to be very tolerant of poorer quality media and music and highlight the trebles and bass covering up lesser quality mids. All these are marketed at people looking for immersive sound in games letting the tweeters accent sounds such as footsteps in games. There are obviously pros and cons with this particular engineering. The pros being that most of these speaker sets are capable of high volumes without too much if any distortion particularly in the bass. The cons are this for the most part is provided you have a good sound card. This is probably with exception to the SP2500's as they have been designed particularly well. Another disadvantage is that these types of speakers are designed to allow high levels of reverb creating more numbers of overtones and undertones giving a false sense of immersion, the reason this is a disadvantage as the reverb and added colours in a 2.1 system can cloud the sound in some 5.1 based media, mainly movies. It slightly detracts from the feeling of true surround sound. If I had to personally recommend PC speakers for gaming I would recommend the SP2500's by Corsair and for more overall use you could get SP2500's, Logitech Z5500, or Klipsch promedia. Now when it's comes down to a choice between 2.1 and 5.1 speakers I would say overall 2.1 is more versitile as 5.1 is really more suited to watching movies. Playing music on a 5.1 system tends to be very detrimental to the whole picture that music of all types is trying to create, so 5.1 is not bad for games and great for films. If you have lots of money and and are looking for that commercial mainstream sound the PC speakers produce I would suggest that you look higher up the price market and take a look at Bang and Olufsson.
Now before I carry on I want to emphasise the difference between monitors and hi-fi speakers. Monitors are designed to expose the flaws in audio whilst speakers are designed to colour the flaws in audio. So I would personally say that speakers aren't worth connecting them to a PC due to the fact that any of the PC speakers mentioned above do just as good and in many cases a better job than speakers do when it comes to playing media through a computer so I will explain more about monitors instead. Monitors give what is called a flat responding sound. They are designed to give an accurate representation of sound in a close field. they are designed to hear everything in the program material. with a flat sound comes next to no reverb creating less overtones and undertones. Now this is a good thing if you want to hear music in it's truest form if you are an audiophile or sound professional but it's also good if you want to hear your music from a studio perspective. Now monitors aren't for everyone as some people prefer the added colours regular speakers create. It is however possible to create the extra dimension of colour through the use of a mixing desk or mixing software. Most modern monitors come in plastic casings instead of traditional wooden cabinets but it is possible to have wooden cabinets custom built or search online for some of the vintage studio monitors for a very reasonable price. Now as far as the
connection and power of monitors is concerned there are different categories to understand.
Active and passive
Powered and unpowered
If the monitors are powered they contain their own power amp, unpowered ones don't. Active and passive refers to something called crossover, meaning splitting the signal into different frequency bands. The monitor basically seperates the low and high frequencies, in other words, and roots them to woofer and tweeter. In a passive monitor there's a simple highpass/lowpass EQ filter that does this job on the signal as it comes from the power amp, but in an active monitor, each frequency band (each speaker) has it's own amp so
there's all sorts of possibilities.
Passive and unpowered (needs a seperate power amp)
passive and powered
active and powered
active and unpowered.
Now as I say monitors aren't for the ears of everyone but if you want very clean flat sound for music played through your computer then these are as true a representation as you are going to get but it will show the various qualities your music may be in so something to consider. The cons of monitors is they flatten the sound of movies when watching them so they're not the best for that but are very good for bringing out the details in games. Gaming is a strange one in the sense that monitors enhance alot of particular sounds by focusing the sound but again in the more epic games where the soundtrack is prevelant you may make the sound a bit too focused. Now I
have never come across monitors that are 100% flat for under £1000 but if you're spending that on monitors I would expect that you are a producer, composer or sound engineer in some way. The market has some very reasonably priced monitors but mostly come in plastic casings. As I said in another thread that Steinway don't make plastic pianos for a reason and the same principle applies with monitors I think. i would recommend going for some vintage monitors for the wooden cabinets. It's a case of going back in time to progress further i think. But some of the modern plastic cased monitors are still very good with monitors such as the KRK Rolkit 8's or the Adams A7X monitors, but as i say if are thinking monitors arefor you I recommend going for a Vintage set of Yamaha NS10's or Infinity SM range monitors. You can
find wooden cabinet monitors usually on ebay or online specialists.
Anyway i hope people enjoy reading this thread and I hope it gives people an idea as to what type of speakers are best for their own personal needs.
I have tried to keep this article as short as i could but to be honest I could have gone into even more detail and written 10 times as much but enjoy either way. thanks
I had a discussion on the forums briefly about the difference between PC speakers and studio monitors after someone entitled a thread (Corsair SP2500 - amazing). After chatting to a few guys on the topic it was quite apparent that quite a few of you guys seemed interested in what your listening to wether it's in a game or a video, or music. After the discussion I said I would write a thread on the different speaker systems and the advantages and disadvantages of each of them so people have a little insight to what's out there in terms of the different options they have in order to suit their listening needs. Now just a little about myself so people understand that i'm not just a music enthusiast giving an opinion. I am a musician of nearly 15 years professional experience who has studied sound in many different forms
for nearly 26 years of my life since i was 5. I have over 23,000 albums from virtually every era in music and virtually every genre of music that exists. I am a professional instrumentalist who currently serves in her majesties Royal
Marines Band who has travelled a large portion of the world with my job. I have also composed and arranged music for many concerts and worked with sound effects and sound production for many concerts and shows.
Now since I joined the forums I am now currently on my third build and along the way the videos that Tom has made along with reading up on many of the forum threads and asking for advice has helped me greatly as building rigs is still a bit of a rolling education for me. I feel that as so many of you guys have helped me it would be good for me to give something back, and sharing a little of my knowledge in speaker systems seems a good way to do that as it's something that is often the thing that is considered after people have built their dream rigs.
Now this isn't going to be a thread throwing a whole load of frequency numbers out at people, just a bit of history and a few descriptions followed by some pros and cons and a conclusion. Telling people frequency numbers isn't really the point of this as people in the main aren't interested in that so i'll leave that for another discussion.
Ok lets start back at the beginning because it's important that we understand how any speaker system has developed over time. Now believe it or not it might suprise some people to know that music was being recorded before general sounds, infact as far back as the ninth century, first in the form of writing symbols which progressed to numbers and finally to notation. The
very first mechanical musical device was created by the Banu Musa brothers in the ninth century which was a hydropowered organ which operated through a system of cylinders and pins. Now I could be guilty of going off topic by giving you all a whole load of pre-history talking about devices such as the Phonautograph, phonograph, grammophone and various other devices
so i'll stop there with that and cut to the chase of what we're here to really know about and that is current speaker systems. I just thought I would share a tiny amount on the the history to explain how far back humans have thought about sound and music. So from the ninth century i'll jump to the 1920's when studio monitors were in the ascendancy of their life. Studio monitors actually started of as speakers designed to pick up interference and obvious productional problems instead of being used to musically evaluate mixes and tracks in an artistic sense. Basically practically all music was recorded live so if the producer considered the recording adequate without interference it was deemed acceptable. Also the bands and artists of the time such as the Paul Whiteman band and Duke Ellington were recorded entirely using only 1 microphone between the entire band through 1 single channel, unlike today where a whole host of microphones and channels are
used depending on the ensemble. Early monitors were basic loudspeaker wooden cabinets whilst the high end state of the art speakers of that time were very large horn operated systems used in the film industry mainly in cinemas during that time. Those larger systems developed over the 1920's and 30's to try and refine issues the speaker companies faced in regards to
cinema sound back then. As a result of the development due to demand by the cinema industry the shearer horn was developed and was considered the industry standard in the mid 1930's. In the 1940's the first high end speaker developed to be a studio monitor was made. This was the Altec Lansing 604 and it's drivers were the work of James bullough Lansing who had supplied the
the drivers for the Shearer horn in the 30's. The 604 took over as the industry standard and remained that way for around 25 years. It also went through no fewer than 11 modifications and upgrades during that 25 year period. The 604 went out of production in the late 90's despite losing it's status as the industry standard nearer the end of the 60's. The 604 could be
seen in almost every studio in the United States during it's tenure. Europe however had a similar set of monitors in the tannoy dual concentric monitors and they were as popular in Europe as the 604's were in the US. Altec lansing did however make a mistake in releasing what was supposed to be a successor to the 604 in 1959 with the 605 duplex. The 605 monitors were heavily critisised by recording companies and never really made much impact to the tried and trusted 604's, however it did leave the reputation of Altec Lansing slightly tainted which eventually led to major recording companies such as Capitol Records and EMI changing their monitors to the JBL D50 monitors with other companies following suit towards the late 60's. Ultimately
The 604's became more obsilete in the late 60's with recording becoming less live and more multi tracking was introduced. At the end of the 60's heading into the 70's JBL became the worlds leader in monitor production with 2 particular sets of monitor. they were the 4320 and 4310 monitors. the 4320 monitors would soon be taking the lead in industry standard status until the 4310 took over as a phenominon. The 4310 changed the way in which recording studios worked by making producers work more at close range to the monitors in order to pick up every detail of their charts tracks and mixes due to the monitors being much smaller in size. The rule was to measure the distance between the monitors and form a perfect triangle between the 2 monitors and the record producer in order to hear the track being produced perfectly. This is still the widely used method in todays recording studios. The main reason for this is during the mid to late 70's when the band the WHO used a dozen JBL4350 monitors capable of 125db each and 2 15inch sub woofers and a 12 inch mid bass driver started a trend in the music of the time with the introduction of the behemoth monitor which was soon considered too crude. A new trend had to be decided upon and in 1978 the introduction of the Yamaha ns10 monitors began it's life as the top choice monitor. Now the Yamaha NS10's didn't start life how you would have thought, infact it's had a pretty difficult start to it's existance. Initially the NS10's were described as horrible due to the fact that they are too brutally honest for their own good. They were small in form and pretty inexpensive. But due to there very clear, flat response they were probably the best monitors for mixers and recording artists due to all the inaccuracies they highlight in people's mixes and tracks. Also part of the NS10's poor start to life was they originally build as household hi-fi speakers and many people didn't like their sound due to them showing their music in it's raw state rather than a produced state, which leads me on to the main difference between PC speakers and monitors in terms of what people are actually hearing.
When you are considering speakers for your PC it's important to establish what it is you will be doing on your computer wether it's writing music, playing games or just listening to your music library. There are many different factors to understand here in terms of setup, cost, and most importantly the sound you get from undertaking specific tasks.
Ok lets look at what the difference between speakers monitors and PC speakers are.
There are a few types of PC speaker, they are speakers such as the Bose companion 3 which is designed for people who enjoy music in a casual sense and general family use. They connect via USB and produce a sound through a digital medium. They are fairly expensive and produce a metalic quality to their sound when to close to a user. They are designed for 5.1 encoded media, games and music order to give the illusion of surround sound by spreading the sound out more but it becomes too aparent that there
is a flaw that when playing lower quality music in your chosen media player, particularly if playing through itunes. Another type are 2.1 auxillary and PC port satelite speakers, and companies such as logitech are fairly prominant in that market. fairly recently Corsair come up with their SP2500 which they say is a gaming set of PC speakers. Now having listened to them and many
other brands such as logitech, Klipsch, JBL, I have to say they all serve more than enough purpose as music, media and gaming speakers with the SP2500 probably in the whole doing the best job overall. Now all the PC/laptop speakers mentioned above are engineered to be very tolerant of poorer quality media and music and highlight the trebles and bass covering up lesser quality mids. All these are marketed at people looking for immersive sound in games letting the tweeters accent sounds such as footsteps in games. There are obviously pros and cons with this particular engineering. The pros being that most of these speaker sets are capable of high volumes without too much if any distortion particularly in the bass. The cons are this for the most part is provided you have a good sound card. This is probably with exception to the SP2500's as they have been designed particularly well. Another disadvantage is that these types of speakers are designed to allow high levels of reverb creating more numbers of overtones and undertones giving a false sense of immersion, the reason this is a disadvantage as the reverb and added colours in a 2.1 system can cloud the sound in some 5.1 based media, mainly movies. It slightly detracts from the feeling of true surround sound. If I had to personally recommend PC speakers for gaming I would recommend the SP2500's by Corsair and for more overall use you could get SP2500's, Logitech Z5500, or Klipsch promedia. Now when it's comes down to a choice between 2.1 and 5.1 speakers I would say overall 2.1 is more versitile as 5.1 is really more suited to watching movies. Playing music on a 5.1 system tends to be very detrimental to the whole picture that music of all types is trying to create, so 5.1 is not bad for games and great for films. If you have lots of money and and are looking for that commercial mainstream sound the PC speakers produce I would suggest that you look higher up the price market and take a look at Bang and Olufsson.
Now before I carry on I want to emphasise the difference between monitors and hi-fi speakers. Monitors are designed to expose the flaws in audio whilst speakers are designed to colour the flaws in audio. So I would personally say that speakers aren't worth connecting them to a PC due to the fact that any of the PC speakers mentioned above do just as good and in many cases a better job than speakers do when it comes to playing media through a computer so I will explain more about monitors instead. Monitors give what is called a flat responding sound. They are designed to give an accurate representation of sound in a close field. they are designed to hear everything in the program material. with a flat sound comes next to no reverb creating less overtones and undertones. Now this is a good thing if you want to hear music in it's truest form if you are an audiophile or sound professional but it's also good if you want to hear your music from a studio perspective. Now monitors aren't for everyone as some people prefer the added colours regular speakers create. It is however possible to create the extra dimension of colour through the use of a mixing desk or mixing software. Most modern monitors come in plastic casings instead of traditional wooden cabinets but it is possible to have wooden cabinets custom built or search online for some of the vintage studio monitors for a very reasonable price. Now as far as the
connection and power of monitors is concerned there are different categories to understand.
Active and passive
Powered and unpowered
If the monitors are powered they contain their own power amp, unpowered ones don't. Active and passive refers to something called crossover, meaning splitting the signal into different frequency bands. The monitor basically seperates the low and high frequencies, in other words, and roots them to woofer and tweeter. In a passive monitor there's a simple highpass/lowpass EQ filter that does this job on the signal as it comes from the power amp, but in an active monitor, each frequency band (each speaker) has it's own amp so
there's all sorts of possibilities.
Passive and unpowered (needs a seperate power amp)
passive and powered
active and powered
active and unpowered.
Now as I say monitors aren't for the ears of everyone but if you want very clean flat sound for music played through your computer then these are as true a representation as you are going to get but it will show the various qualities your music may be in so something to consider. The cons of monitors is they flatten the sound of movies when watching them so they're not the best for that but are very good for bringing out the details in games. Gaming is a strange one in the sense that monitors enhance alot of particular sounds by focusing the sound but again in the more epic games where the soundtrack is prevelant you may make the sound a bit too focused. Now I
have never come across monitors that are 100% flat for under £1000 but if you're spending that on monitors I would expect that you are a producer, composer or sound engineer in some way. The market has some very reasonably priced monitors but mostly come in plastic casings. As I said in another thread that Steinway don't make plastic pianos for a reason and the same principle applies with monitors I think. i would recommend going for some vintage monitors for the wooden cabinets. It's a case of going back in time to progress further i think. But some of the modern plastic cased monitors are still very good with monitors such as the KRK Rolkit 8's or the Adams A7X monitors, but as i say if are thinking monitors arefor you I recommend going for a Vintage set of Yamaha NS10's or Infinity SM range monitors. You can
find wooden cabinet monitors usually on ebay or online specialists.
Anyway i hope people enjoy reading this thread and I hope it gives people an idea as to what type of speakers are best for their own personal needs.
I have tried to keep this article as short as i could but to be honest I could have gone into even more detail and written 10 times as much but enjoy either way. thanks
