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pressure hit our auditory canals. I once<br />
went into a control room that had recently<br />
been completed and was being shown to<br />
me by its proud designers and installers.<br />
To be fair, it was a DIY job, but an expensive<br />
one by people who claimed to know what<br />
they were doing. You know what’s coming:<br />
as soon as the fi rst millivolts hit the<br />
drivers I wanted to run screaming from the<br />
room, pausing only to collect a sick bag.<br />
They had been working in there since the<br />
room was fi nished, with the monitors wired<br />
in opposite polarity, and hadn’t noticed.<br />
When I put it right, as I felt duty-bound to<br />
do in as diplomatic a way as I could muster,<br />
they acknowledged that it sounded better<br />
but couldn’t put their fi ngers on why, and<br />
pronounced the difference to be ‘subtle’<br />
and something that only an experienced<br />
engineer like myself would notice. Is this<br />
true? Seriously, write in and tell me.<br />
Back To School<br />
But there’s worse to come. I subsequently<br />
participated in a seminar about audio<br />
training, where I raised the idea that there<br />
are audio people and<br />
non-audio people, just<br />
as there are people who<br />
are musically talented<br />
and those who are<br />
not. Most of the audio<br />
people I know began<br />
by messing about with<br />
sound equipment at an<br />
early age; my dad bought<br />
a tape recorder when I<br />
was eight and I was soon<br />
trying to break it, fi nding<br />
out that it worked by<br />
electricity by connecting<br />
a light bulb to its speaker<br />
output and watching it<br />
fl ash, and experimenting<br />
with the rubbish soundon-sound<br />
system that did nothing more<br />
than turn the erase head off. Sad and nerdy<br />
I know, but it got me where I am today and I<br />
suspect the same is true <strong>for</strong> many an audio<br />
professional. I suggested that it was no<br />
more possible to teach somebody to be an<br />
monitors <strong>2009</strong><br />
Dynaudio BM12A<br />
audio pro from scratch at college than<br />
it was to train somebody to be a<br />
professional musician in the same<br />
time; there had to<br />
be a natural aptitude<br />
and a long-standing<br />
enthusiastic involvement<br />
<strong>for</strong> it to work.<br />
To demonstrate my point<br />
about those who’ve got<br />
it and those who haven’t,<br />
I related the above story<br />
about the out-of-phase<br />
monitors, suggesting<br />
that an inability to<br />
discern the difference<br />
should mark someone<br />
down as not cut out to<br />
be in pro audio and rule<br />
out the possibility of<br />
ever working in it. To my<br />
astonishment, a senior guy from a wellknown<br />
training organisation dismissed<br />
what I was saying by commenting, “well<br />
maybe they liked their monitors out of<br />
phase”. To me (and I suspect to many<br />
others in the room)<br />
that kind of proved the<br />
point, and damaged<br />
permanently my regard<br />
<strong>for</strong> that particular<br />
training organisation.<br />
But, worryingly (there<br />
is a point here, honest),<br />
AES20 recommends,<br />
early in its guidelines,<br />
using test tones to<br />
establish whether the<br />
speakers under test<br />
are correctly wired in<br />
phase. Feeling, as I<br />
do, that it’s no more<br />
possible to miss out-ofphase<br />
speakers than to<br />
miss a giraffe walking<br />
into the room, I would regard this as<br />
completely unnecessary; but if the august<br />
AES members who drew up the standard<br />
feel it to be important, I have to wonder<br />
whether my sensitivity to the phenomenon<br />
is unusual. Another example shows what<br />
Focal CMS 50<br />
I mean: years ago I was at an Ambisonics<br />
seminar and demonstration at a top<br />
studio, attended by some of the industry<br />
grandees. When it came to<br />
the demo, on a system that<br />
had clearly been carefully set<br />
up and checked by the people<br />
presenting the day, some of<br />
us felt uneasy; this wasn’t<br />
delivering what we knew an<br />
Ambisonic playback system<br />
could. Eventually one person<br />
was brave enough to stand up<br />
and say so; we were hurriedly<br />
offered a cup of coffee and the<br />
system was taken apart and<br />
checked. It transpired that of<br />
the four identical speakers<br />
chosen <strong>for</strong> the demo, one of<br />
them had one of its drives<br />
wired back to front. That<br />
was enough, <strong>for</strong> several of us, to wreck<br />
the reproduced image, while <strong>for</strong> others it<br />
apparently made no difference. Remember<br />
that these were all experienced audio pros.<br />
Discuss…<br />
The fact that some people like certain<br />
colour combinations that others consider<br />
to clash, and that Marmite can revel in<br />
the polarisation it causes, suggests that<br />
in every sensory area our systems are<br />
probably conveying completely different<br />
impressions to us. If this is true of<br />
hearing, then it makes the whole subject<br />
of monitoring even more of a subjective<br />
quagmire than it already is. If we all hear<br />
such different things, if we are all sensitive<br />
to different aspects of sound, then the<br />
trade-offs and compromises inherent in<br />
loudspeaker design will have different<br />
impacts on different people. We take it<br />
as a given that there’s no such thing as a<br />
perfect transducer, and that engineering<br />
a loudspeaker simply means making the<br />
best fi st of it that one can among the<br />
minefi eld of interacting variables; it seems<br />
to me possible that improving one aspect<br />
at the expense of another will make a<br />
speaker sound ‘better’ to one person<br />
and ‘worse’ to another.<br />
THE INTERNATIONAL AUDIO MONITORS BUYER’S GUIDE 9