The day has come :-) I took the plunge and committed to the purchase of some recording equipment. And here I will give you a small rundown of what I got and what it is like. First: I changed my mind on a last minute about my Studio speakers. The Esi near 05 was hard to come by in any shops in Dublin, and as I have not used these companies’ products in the past, I would at least like to see them in real life before ordering them online. There were some M-Audio speakers in the Music maker in Dublin. Friend of mine in Denmark has an older pair of M-Audio speakers in his home recording set up, and while I was visiting him, I was very impressed with them. So the new M-Audio Studiophile AV 40 was the way I decided to go. They gave me a great deal, they matched Thomanns prices :-).
I took my knife and carefully sliced the box open. And in it I found another box. So the anticipation builds up again, and second time I run my blade along the tape. I am greeted with two booklets, M-Audios Overdub volume 1, a guide to studio monitors and a Glossy user guide. The speakers are resting between two polystyrene trays. Between them is a bag full of leads and a power lead. I knew from reviews of these speakers that one of them is the power speaker and the other is a slave. So I detect the one with more connections on the back, and lift it up. It is heavy for its size, I like that. There is a foam pads with one sticky side at the bottom of the box. They look like you can attach them to the bottom of the speaker for avoiding scratches and for a little separation from the table, again a nice extra. I lift the other slave the box, and to my surprise this one is heavy as well. In the bag full of leads I find a stereo mini jack to phono lead, not any mind blowing quality, but still pretty sturdy. Some good quality speaker cable to connect the two speakers together and for some reason here is also a stereo mini jack to stereo mini jack lead. I assume it is for the auxiliary in connection on front of the power speaker. Also on front of the speaker you can find a volume control and a phones input -nice extra. The speakers have 4” woofer and a 1” tweeter. Also at the back you have a bass reflex port. At the back of the master speaker we have TRS and line inputs, bass boost switch, power switch, fuse and an AC selector (Leave this alone!).
So I connect the speakers together, connect the power lead, and as I am still waiting for the Zoom R16 unit, I connect the speakers directly to my laptop. At this point it is good idea to play some music that you know really well through the speakers and get used to what they sound through the speakers. And today I feel like Foo Fighters “The Pretender”. Lets Rock!
Wow! The sound is big! I can't turn the speaker past half way in my small room. This just proves that my choice to go for a bit smaller speakers was the right one. There is no point to get massive speakers if you are mixing in a small room. The bottom end is massive, but I noticed that the bass boost was switched on, so I flip it off and presto. The detail is great; I can really hear the whole stereo spectrum in front of me very clearly. Also the top is clear. Everything seems surprisingly well balanced even before I spent any time positioning these correctly. So far I am very happy with my purchase. I will let you know more on the performance after I get some serious work done on these.
As mentioned I still need to elevate the speakers to my ear level on my desk, and make sure they are equal distance from where I sit while doing my mixes. This will take some trial and error, I'm sure. Also I need to be extra careful in my small room that the speakers don't reflect of the walls. So lots of testing, moving, listening, and repeating the three before ;-)
I also got an AKG Perception 220 microphone and the Zoom R16 and I will go through these as well in the next few weeks. Let me just say, this experience has restored my faith in local music shops, the service was great and they matched the big online monsters prices. And if something happened to be faulty, the stores are just up the road.
To my delight my submission to AWAL (digital distribution company) was accepted few days a go. So it looks like I will have the Christmas single out in December, but more on that later. So far AWAL have proved to be great. Fast and efficient, but still very approachable and down to earth.
Now I have one favour to ask: Those of you who have not done so yet, please do sign up to my Emailing list by clicking here :-)
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