I came across this link and thought I would share it with you all as you might find it fun to read.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun02/articles/monitors.asp

Interesting read, thanks 'Babylon'!

Surprised to see that some 'pro' monitors cost more than HIFI offerings.

I was always under the impression that we pay a 'premium' for the HIFI / High End tag. This may be the case as we move away from monitor speakers, and further up the ladder of full range floor standing transducers.

The famous 'Abbey Road Studios' use B & W speakers in one of their studios, which correlates with the conclusion of the SOS article writer.

http://www.abbeyroad.com/studios/studio2/


Welcome to the forum by the way, feel free to share your knowledge and experiences in HI FI, we all try to benefit from one another!

The pro world has been eviscerated by the music business' changes in fortune. Possibly more so than domestic audio. A pair of in-wall active Genelec or similar cost anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds, but are designed to go into multi-million-dollar studios.

Multi-million-dollar studios aren't being built anymore. In fact, the multi-million-dollar studios of the 1980s and 1990s are closing at an alarming rate. Abbey Road is fast becoming a museum. Townhouse, Olympic, Eel Pie, Roundhouse, Soho, Mayfair, Cream, Great Lindford, Ridge Farm, Wessex studios and more have all closed. Some - like Parr Street Studios in Liverpool - has survived, but only by diversifying (it's now an entertainment complex and designer hotel, built around a trio of now largely underused and aging studios). And that's just the UK.

So companies that used to build for studios now need to build for home studios. This means low price has eclipsed performance, consistency and reliability. Which is why we get desktop monitors being used as the only speakers in the recording chain; people used to use NS10s in part because they thought they gave an approximation of how the recording would sound on the least 'fi' of 'hi-fi' products, not as the sole indicator of what is happening on the recording.

Sadly, in desperate times, people will sell what they can to the maximum number of people, rather than sell what is right to the right people.

You seem to have a good knowledge of the subject "Fnuckle".

So, with the closing down of the top studios, where all the new recordings are being recorded?

I can understand it with electronic music where the recording can be simply created by computer based systems but, what about groups, solo performers and the like, and also, Classical music?

Where is all this recorded music we buy on vinyl or CD comes from?

Victims of their own excess in some ways with exorbitant rates of hire and not always delivering what they promised.l think giving people the ability to record their own music has been a good thing,At the same time i think there will always be a demand for people who can mix edit and produce in much the same way as modern djs have come to prominance.
Portable recording gear is so good these days-this impinges on the Classical field very much.
One thing a lot of people dont realise is that every cd /album made has a master recorded on 2inch magnetic tape as well as digitally-no one ultimately trusts computers!!l still use DAT and half-inch magnetic tape alonside digital formats and many still use analogue equipment for recording thank goodness1
oh and Arthur i think the Abbey Road monitors employed by George Martin were Genelecs.Someones bound to point it out if im wrong.

Do you think portable or even home studio can compare to what the big million buck studio sound could offer jilly? I've no idea, so it's not a trick question.

Good question Adam and i dont have a definitive answer except to say that with the economy of scale of a big studio fully equipped,most musicians would want to record their music in such a place-but there are many great pieces of music that have been recorded quite modestly and still measured up,so the question has many ambiguities....weve all heard a duff album made on the best gear in the world havent we?
Some studios have a charm and this just cannot be replicated but consider how much good stuff came from modest beginnings before the artist/s hit the big time and their record companies splashed out on all the top recording gizmos....
lf you look at two examples of definitive rock-Beatles and Floyd its amazing how home made and amateurish it all was in production-tape splicing and stereo sweeps etc and yet the music was the important thing and stood the test of time.So the answer is-l dont know!

OK, I have a problem with the OP's article. If they had a pair of Dynaudio BM5s why didn't they copmpare them to Dynaudio's equivalent domestic model (in those days, the Dynaudio Audience 42 or possibly 52)? Comparing against a different manufacturer - and a different manufacturer's far cheaper entry level model at that - simply makes no sense!

There was asome talk a couple of years ago of a few top rated engineers having gone back to analogue recorders because they reckoned they weren't getting the best results from the digital ones.

Abbey Rd has been using B&Ws for a long time. B&W's 800 series seems very much in favour in a lot of the bigger studios - Lucasfilm also use B&W 800s. Notice that studio 1 uses B&W 800s and that studio 2 uses 805s. That said, other brands which curry favour with the studios (particularly in the UK) are PMC, ATC and Dynaudio.