When setting up your home studio, an important factor to take into consideration is the type of monitor to buy. Besides the acoustics of your room, this will greatly impact the listening experience in your studio. If you pick the wrong monitor for the kind of room you will be using, you could hinder your ability to create recordings that would translate when played in other environments.
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You should know that the easiest way to take room acoustics out of the picture is with a good pair of headphones. With these, you will have zero reflected sounds hitting your ears, with the left side playing directly into your left ear, and the right one doing the same to your right ear.
Monitors will introduce acoustics into the scene, making both ears hear both sides, giving it different listening experience. Having this in mind, monitors still remain important since a lot of music is enjoyed through some kind of speaker.
What is a studio monitor? Before we delve into that, let us take a look at the parts of the monitor.
The electronics of a monitor are housed by the cabinet. This cabinet can be made out of different materials like wood, metal, or plastic. Most studio monitors have two separate drivers or speakers. The higher one (vertically) is called a tweeter. Tweeters often come in a cone or dome shape and are constructed using various materials. They are responsible for the production of high frequencies, usually starting at 2 KHz.
The other speaker that is found below the tweeter, vertically, is called a woofer. The woofers are mostly cone shaped and they are responsible for the production of low to mid frequencies in monitors with two drivers and are fondly called two-way.
Some monitors are designed with a third driver, a mid-range speaker. In this three-way monitor system, the tweeter will provide a high frequency, while the mid-range speaker will produce mid frequencies, and the woofer will give low frequencies.
Each of these drivers, behind them, is an electromagnet. This magnet is pulsed on and off in rapid motions, making the drivers move back and forth fast enough so it can reproduce a complex audio signal. The driver’s vibration vibrates air molecules around the driver, making sound waves recreate the audio.