Paavo---Yamaha MSP20 Monitors. The worst in the world?

Speaker design is Paavo's special interest so post away.
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Robert H
Posts: 19
Joined: Tue Apr 26, 2005 8:28 am

Paavo---Yamaha MSP20 Monitors. The worst in the world?

Post by Robert H »

Hi Paavo,

Im posting this on the off chance you may have heard the Yamaha MSP20's. Generally I dont think I have been comfortable using them since I bought them. I suspect because I paid more for them than any other speakers (1800 euros) I may have conditioned myself to believe they are good.

About a week ago I decided to plug in my old battered JBL control 1's to use as another monitoring source for checking mixes....(Due to Har Bal btw)......Anyway, I have found already that I MUCH PREFER the Control 1's. When Im mixingeEverything sounds more together. With the Yamahas I get a feeling that sounds stick out like a sore thumb, whcih I think causes me to fiddle with the EQ on one thing for to long....hence losing the vibe maybe?. I can hear much more detail with the Yamahas, but I think they sound boring. When I switch to the JBL's the sound is more lively

The JBL's have a lot of prescence(I think?)....and I can hear things like Hi Hats, and Hi Mid stuff which are louder on the JBL's. I really like to be able to hear those elements when mixing a track.....I think the Yamahas are very flat sounding..

You can pick up a set of control 1' for about 50 euros...a long way from 1800.

Is it just me..., do I prefer the sound of cheap// :lol: or are the Yamahas turkeys.


Other speakers I have tried and dont like

Mackies (all o fthem)
Genelc (all of the ones I tried)
Tannoy (all of the ones I tried)
Yamaha (NS10M and now maybe the MSP20)


Speakers I like (and have mixed many records through them)

Bose 101 (mainly used in the corner of bar roofs)
control 1's
+ just about any set of multimedia computer speakers with subwoofer


Do you have any idea as to why I seem to prefer what most would call 'Total Rubbish' for mixing. And like I said, I have made many records that were mixed through the Control 1' s or the JBL's.
HarBal
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Post by HarBal »

Hi Robert,

You raise an interesting and important question. Most people seem to think that a good speaker system will perform as specifications would imply, in any room and setup. The fact is that what you hear in real situations is always a complex interplay between the speakers and the room they are sitting in. This applies irrespective of whether or not you are near field monitoring or not because the distance you have to be from the monitors for the room to not affect what you are hearing is much closer than most people think (definitely less than 50cm).

In short, what you hear is a combination of the direct sound from the speakers and the ambient reflected content from the room. Now for everything to sound spectrally correct what needs to happen is that the spectral content of the ambient component has to be near flat and the polar response of the loudspeaker near flat too. If one or the other isn't then you'll end up with a strong colouration. If the polar response annomalies just happen to compliment and approxiamtely cancel the ambient resonances of your room then a technically inferior loudspeaker will actually sound better than a more expensive and superior one. I suspect this is what is happening in your situation. By all means, sell your MSP20s if you are satisfied with what you get with your JBL's but I strongly suspect that you may have some real acoustic issues to deal with if you want a truly natural and pleasant sounding system to work with. Your comments seem to suggest to me that the Yamahas are probably worth the money you paid for them but the room is colouring what you hear.

Optimising room acoustics is a challenging issue for anyone to deal with. But if you truly want good sound you have to deal with it all the same. Good acoustics rarely happens naturally. It has to be designed for and each situation is unique, requiring custom solutions. It need not be hugely expensive and when you have them sorted you will be amazed by the difference in sound clarity and suprised and how little it cost you (provided you're willing to do some work on it yourself that is). You don't need high tech materials and fabrication techniques, you don't need Sonnex or some other treatment. What you do need is a means on measuring your room response (you can do that with Har-Bal and a good instrumentation Mic - try Behringer ECM8000 for an inexpensive one) and the means of building some absorbers, which may range from drapes and curtains to something a little more complicated to deal with specific resonance issues.

My room and my speakers are a good case in point. The speakers sounded very accurate but at the same time very difficult to listen to in my less than optimal room treatment case. The main problem was a 6dB resonance imposed by the room at 3kHz which really coloured the ambinet response and made it very fatiguing to listen to anything for an extended period. At one point I was blaming my speakers but after I did some measurments I realized that it was a room issue. My first attempt at treatment went part way to solving the issue but it was not optimal by any means, and ended up creating a whole in the mid band. My second attempt is pretty much optimal and sounds it too. It took me a year to get it right but in terms of the actual time spent fixing and building what was necessary, it would only add up to a week or two of work. In terms of material cost I would have spent no more than $1000 AUS dollars (500 EU) and that is including my first absorbers which were dismantled and re-built to a different design.

What I would suggest to anyone buying gear is that they should be prepared to spend as much money on treating their room as they would on the speakers. That's not to say that you will need to spend that much (you may be blessed with a room that needs little attention), but you should be prepared to spend that much if it needs it. If not, then your investment in speakers will have been wasted. The other thing you should keep in mind is that the key specification to your loudspeakers is the uniformity of the off axis polar response (in vertical and horizontal planes). This thing is rarely if ever documented in loudspeaker specs but you can generally infer it from a few other specs. Basically what you are looking for in a two way system is a crossover point around 2kHz, a LF driver no bigger than about 7" and a crossover slope of at least 18dB/oct. The drivers should be mounted close to one another on the baffle. For a three way system the upper crossover point should be around 3-4KHz and the crossover slope the same. My speakers are essentially like a hybrid 2-way and subwoofer system. The crossover point is 2kHz using a 3rd order crossover and the low-mid and mids are covered using two 5 inch woofer mid range units from 120Hz to 2kHz. This gives them a very good horizontal dispersion that makes them sound mid-range rich in an average room, but the accuracy of the important mid range is very good owing to the small driver size. The low frequencies come from a bandpass enclosure where a 6 inch woofer is entirely enclosed in the box and the sound eminates from a 50mm diameter vent about 50cm above the floor. That covers an octave from 50Hz to 120Hz with a roll off slope similar to an infinite baffle arrangement. Having the extra octave below 50Hz is not really necessary in most situations because the wall reflections (ie. radition into something between a half and quarter space) provide adequate lift to fill this hole.

In my opinion, what you should probably steer clear of is any speaker whose central tentant is linear phase or phase coherent response (unless it is an active speaker system) because this means it will be using a first order crossover. That means there will be a huge overlap in driver output so the horizontal plane polar response may well be good but the vertical plane will be bad. This will colour your room response. I have a friend who has a pair of Duntech Marquis, a 150W Perraux intregrated and a 200W Perrraux power amp in a bi-amped arrangement which I've heard. It sounds reasonable but the total cost of the gear is around $15000 AUS and I prefer my humble $3000 AUS system anyday. In terms of clarity there's no comparison. Now most of that is the treatment of room acoustics, but part of that has to do with the design philosophy that Duntech follows, which in my opinion, just doesn't work in real rooms. The vertical polar response is attrocious which colours the ambient field.

I think that's enough rambling for one day. I recently read an excellent article on getting the best out of your speakers. Here it is.

http://www.harmanaudio.com/all_about_au ... _rooms.pdf

Have a read and think about what you could do to improve your acoustic set up. Once you gone through the easy stuff then go about measuring the room response and think about how you might optimise that. One of these days I'll document what I did to treat my room and make it available to anyone who's interested.

Regards,


Paavo.

PS - Be sure to read this if you haven't already.

http://har-bal.com/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/ ... .php?t=244
Robert H
Posts: 19
Joined: Tue Apr 26, 2005 8:28 am

Post by Robert H »

Hi Paavo,

Apologies for my very late response.

Thank you very much for taking the time to explain things to me. I have to be honest and say that much of what you said is over my head, but I have read it many times and hopefully some of it will sink in :)

Thanks again, and its nice to know that you took the time to help me out, many others wouldnt.

Ive decided to get rid of the Yamahas. Their simply not my taste in sound. I hear to much detail and thi smakes me paranoid when mixing tracks. For the moment Im still using the JBL control 1's. Many wouldnt like them I know that, but they seem to work for me.

:)
HarBal
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Post by HarBal »

Hi Robert,

No need to apologise and your approach sounds fine to me. You should use whatever monitors sound right to you. Everybody has different ears if you can use monitors that compensate for the differences in your hearing from the "norm" (even though I hate that term) then you'll most likely find that your mixes are better for it.

Cheers,


Paavo.
Robert H
Posts: 19
Joined: Tue Apr 26, 2005 8:28 am

Post by Robert H »

And Im still trying to absorb your information. Maybe by the year 2015 :?


Best
:)
HarBal
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Post by HarBal »

Hey it takes time to diggest most things. The longer you think things over the better the understanding. I think they call it "wisdom".

I'm still working on my room acoustics. It is pretty satisfying at the moment but I believe it can be improved with some added HF absortion and diffusion on the rear wall (actually doors in my case). I've got a nice concept design for making such and absorber / diffuser. I just need to find the time to do it. I don't see it happening soon.

Cheers,


Paavo.
Jetflow1
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Jun 25, 2010 5:54 pm

Re: Paavo---Yamaha MSP20 Monitors. The worst in the world?

Post by Jetflow1 »

HI Paavo:

In this post you mentioned that you can do room correction with an impulse mic and Har-Bal, but I did not read anywhere on how to do this.

Could you please explain how?

Thanks,
Mike M

BTW, Har-Bal is amazing..Great job guys.
HarBal
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Re: Paavo---Yamaha MSP20 Monitors. The worst in the world?

Post by HarBal »

Hi Mike,

Room acoustics optimisation is as much an art as a science. It isn't something trivial, but by the same token, I wouldn't want to put anyone off trying to improve the sound of their room simply because it may take them some time.

What I may have alluded to with Har-Bal and an impulse test is that you can get a handle on the colouration your room may be adding to what you hear and then from that plan a treatment strategy. That is essentially what I've done in my own room case though it is better to do a proper frequency response measurement using pink noise driving one channel only and recording the output with a measurement microphone at the listening position. Then with a two channel FFT spectrum analyser you can easily measure total response at the listening position. If you are really serious about trying but don't have the analyser you can simply record the pink noise going into the amp and the mic signal of the sound reproduced by the speakers onto a single wave file (say left pink noise in, right recorded sound) and send it to me and I can analyse it for you and send back the graphical results (actually there's an idea for a web app).

There are two basic areas of concern in the results. The primary one is discrete early reflections in the impulse response. If you have them then they will cause imagining ambiguity and ultimately listening fatigue. You should have a reverberant tail in the impulse response that has no dominant peaks but decays away uniformly. Also, it is important to have the right level of ambiance in the room so the ambiance tail needs to be there. Without enough ambiance, the room will sound dead and your stereo image sweet spot small and most likely your sound stage too. Too much ambiance and you'll lose clarity.

Once the impulse response issue is resolved then the overall spectrum balance needs to be considered. The ideal frequency response for a room is to have a nominally flat response up to around 1kHz and then to have it fall away at a constant slope to be around 6-10dB down at 20kHz. A room response that is completely flat will sound unnaturally bright. The tapering off of the top end gives a warmer more intimate sound.

The question is how to achieve the changes required with treatments. You have two tools at hand, absorption and diffusion. For the ambiance tail, if you have prominent discrete spikes these correspond to primary reflections off walls, floor or ceiling. There isn't much you can do about the floor reflection as it is necessary because our ears expect it, but the wall and ceiling reflections should be controlled using diffusers.

The overall level of ambiance and the colour you control with absorption. If the balance is right then broadband is absorption is all that is required to obtain the reverb time you need. If you find that it is too short (dry sound) then absorption removal will be necessary (taking out deep pile carpet for instance). Another thing you should be wary of is that absorption should be evenly spread around the room in all planes. One of the biggest problems with typical domestic situations is that the adsorption is often concentrated in one plane only (the floor) leading to slap wall to wall echoes being present and floor to ceiling ones not. If you then go about reducing the wall to wall echos with absorption you'll typically find that your room then starts sounding acoustically dead and uninteresting. Worse still is that it exacerbates the low frequency standing wave because they aren't effectively absorbed by typical treatments. If this sounds familiar then I'd suggest a reflective floor with a few strategically placed rugs to raise the ambiance level again.

When you have a concentration of energy in certain spectrum regions you then need to use tuned absorption which can take a number of forms from plates to wells, to Helmholtz resonators. Once you get into this realm you need to experiment a lot to find the right type and number of absorbers.

The easy solution is the electronic fix with something like Audessey but that will perform best when the room is properly treated conventionally first. Additionally, the electronic fix does nothing to cure the problem of a too dead room. It will certainly remove spectrum anomalies and some primary reflection problems but if it is too dead the sweet spot and sound stage will still sound narrow.

At some point I intend adding electronic "fixes" to Har-Bal but that isn't on the cards for the next release. The capability is being built into it for the future but the final implementation is some way off. That ultimate end will also have the analysis tools built in for you to be able to do this assessing as well, but again, I have enough on my plate at the moment.

cheers,


Paavo.
Jetflow1
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Jun 25, 2010 5:54 pm

Re: Paavo---Yamaha MSP20 Monitors. The worst in the world?

Post by Jetflow1 »

Hi Paavo:

Thank you for your informative reply. After reading your post, I decided to give something a try that I was considering for a while; Auto Eqing. Because this is now off topic, I am starting a new thread on this.

Thanks,
Mike
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