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Here's some extracts from a previous thread from December 2001.
Seanbaker:- Is there a good pair of near field computer monitors that are accurate enough to rely on mixing with? Wouldn't that make life a lot easier if I didn't have to route my soundcard through a mixer just to use decent studio monitors?
Syntrillium M.D. :- In a word...(well, two words)...Probably not.
Computer Speakers and 'Nearfield Monitoring' are apples and oranges. Any decent nearfield monitor setup is going to require some form of amplification (unless the speakers in question are already amplified) and will undoubtedly have 1/4" TRS, XLR or at least RCA input jacks - (some perhaps, even standard 'speaker wire' type inputs)
So, with that in mind, you could actually drive a good pair of amped (or bi-amped) speakers directly from the 1/4" outs of your soundcard's breakout box (or something along those lines)...But if your card has a standard 1/8" miniplug, well, you'd probably want to go through a small mixer anyway...just a thought.
Rockindel1:- Best thing to do is go to a music store that has a professional selling monitors, bring some reference material you are intimately familiar with and listen to different monitors . Everyone's ears hear the same thing a little different so its best if you hear what they sound like, and decide which is best for you. Stay away from "computer" sound monitors, most profesional monitors will be shielded for placing them next to a video monitor.
Solotune:- At the risk of opening a really big can of worms, I believe the term "near field monitor" is more a marketing term than a technical one. Although it generally refers to a time aligned driver mount, they usually appear to be the same old woofer and tweeter bolted to the baffle.
Just bear in mind that there are some really good sounding and accurate speakers that simply call themselves, well, speakers!
SteveG:- I think you'll find that 'near field' is an acoustic term, actually, and it really does have a specific meaning, and that relates to the acoustic environment. In this context the 'near field' in a room is the area (usually in front!) around a speaker where the response is not dominated by the room. This distance varies somewhat according to the size of the room and the absorption coefficient of the materials in it. In an otherwise indifferently treated room, a knowledge of this distance, and knowing what your 'near field' monitors really sound like can be extremely significant in terms of achieving a decent mix.
This is the problem that most people who do location recordings suffer from. It will also be apparent that all loudspeakers have a 'near field' - whether you can make use of it is another matter though, because the time alignment of large speakers means that it often isn't possible to listen sensibly to them at a close distance, because the drivers are too far apart. With speakers like these, the 'sweet spot' principle becomes more important.
The other thing that might be apparent from this explanation of 'near field' is why sub-bass units just don't cut it in this situation. In order to work, they have to interact with the room - this is the way they are designed. And trying to get any phase-coherent transition from the mid-range to the sub-bass is out of the question, because the positional relationship isn't fixed in space as it is in a conventional drive unit.
So a typical 'near-field' unit most certainly has to guarantee to be time aligned, and present a coherent wavefront much closer to the drive units than large 'main' monitors do. Those are the main things that will qualify a monitor as 'near-field'.
VoodooRadio:- Good speakers don't necessarily carry the moniker "Near Field". I had a set of Yorkville bookshelves that would more than keep up with my M1's and NS10m's. If you are putting up your mixes for hire/sell then I would definitely spring for the best speaker/amp set-up you can afford. If you "do the music" thing for yourself/family/friends then, you might be hard pressed to justify spending a bucket of $$$. Good mixes require good ears! Each individual here (hear) should stop and ask themselves.... What do I do to protect my ears? Do I have any idea of the dB's that I encounter in my daily routine? Do I "prepare" myself for a mixing session, mindful of the working volume at all times? Do I take breaks while mixing, to allow for my ears to rest? Do I clean my ears? (that last one can be tricky...you shouldn't be digging around in your ears with anything) I'm sure that there are some of us here that have a "routine" concerning these matters. For the ones that don't..... please take notice. The approach taken could be your "best" investment.
Craig Jackman:- You have to listen to more than one pair at once. If you listen to one at a time you'll never be sure of what you're hearing. I've run a couple of different Tannoy's, Yamaha's, EV Sentry's, Mackie's, and Genelec's through my room. I thought I liked the Tannoy's (PSM8) but wound up frustrated during mixes. I hated, with a passion you wouldn't believe, the NS-10s. They were accurate enough, but I was tired after listening to them all day. EV's? Same as the Tannoy's. The Mackie's should have been great, but I couldn't tune them to respond well in the room I was using at the time (they are highly adjustable). No matter what I did they just sounded woofy ... I had a client in when they were on test and even the client picked up on them. That left me with the speaker love of my life - Genelec 1029's (I added the 1092 subwoofer later). More expensive - yes that's true, but accurate without leaving me spent at the end of the day. Heck I want to listen more!
SteveG:- I'm sure that there are quite a lot of speakers that qualify without the label. Actually some pretty big speakers qualify as well - Tannoy's original monitor range did, as they had multi-concentric time aligned drivers - you could put these monsters pretty close together and still get a coherent sound from them.
As far as the Mackies and their range of adjustments goes, that's definitely a can of worms. Strictly speaking, this is making a nonsense of the idea behind near-field monitoring, but it also recognises that life just ain't perfect, I suppose. If you have a room that absorbs so little, or reflects so much locally that you can't even make an equilateral triangle with a pair of speakers 4 or 5 feet apart without the room significantly affecting the sound you are hearing, it's almost certainly not going to be a room in which a satisfactory mix can easily be done, IMHO. I am a little surprised that there is so much adjustment available, because it does make setting them up significantly more difficult, regardless of the situation in the room. It's actually a debatable point as to whether this is the right way to design a near-field monitor at all.
Lest anybody get the wrong impression about what I said about sub-bass units, I do fully recognise that some speakers are actually designed to be used pretty accurately in this way, but usually with the sub-bass unit situated equally between the satellites in order to minimise the phase problems. And I haven't yet seen a computer speaker system that even remotely qualifies as any sort of reference monitor worthy of the name.
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