Bright High End Speakers = Bad Room?

Then there are speakers that are more bright than they actually should be, which may be fine as a working tool identifying problems in a recording.

Pro speakers for recording rigs in studios with consoles (64 channels, etc) are designed to be bright, or chosen for their unnatural brightness...as a form of revealing what is put in a mix. So that it is spotlit and thus manipulable, workable, mutable, changeable. Where slight changes in the recording can be heard. It is purposely exaggerated and unnatural.

This means you should never think that a studio monitor speaker is even remotely suitable for neutral and balanced home use. They are emphatically not.

Neutral speakers for mastering, is another thing altogether.

This is true most of the time, so much so that it is a logical maxim. There will be exceptions or people taking exception with such statement. Sure. Whatever... But it is very much a norm in recording studios. Horses for courses.

NS-10 speakers from Yamaha, for example... are trash. Utter trash, and not suitable for home use or balanced listening to actual recordings in your home. Unless one is a masochist.

The anechoic and/or quasi-anechoic measurements people are used to seeing are supposed to be flat.
In a room you should have a descending response from around 100-150 Hz. This is what all of the automated room-correction software tries to do, more or less. They don’t attempt a ruler flat response for exactly the reason stated by the OP.


There are some other things going on in tweeters I'd like to mention though.


B&W and some other "high end" speakers use a ragged tweeter response designed to elicit a sense of detail. This is a trait I blame Stereophile for hyping/promoting as "neutral." It isn't.


Brands which shy away from this kind of tweeter trickery are Magico, Vandersteen and YG Acoustics.  However, that doesn't mean the rest of their response is ruler flat/accurate either. Just that they at least don't try this hyper-detail trickery.  Of course, I call it trickery, you might call it a wonderful feature. :)


Having said all this, I also find that the floor area behind/between the speakers is an unexpected place for harshness in a speaker sound. If you have a solid floor or rack between the speakers, it’s worth experimenting with blankets/pillows in the area.

I find that the most natural and comfortable to listen to speakers are the ones that employ some subtle version of "The BBC Dip".

Highly revealing, spacious, well done lower slope crossovers, fast, tuneful, all of it, with a slight BBC Dip. Clean and warm, as the mix demands. A properly done BBC Dip, in my design experience....has the lowest part of the dip centered around 3.5khz and then goes back up again, and is about 2db deep, overall, as a best potential compromise.

And then it’s good all around and it can play all day, at any volume. From soft to break the windows levels...

Everything else that might be off.....is generally just bad equipment choices. (It is a multistage learning curve and individually committed to as an act --same goal, and very probably a different path for each person)

This graph has it as being slightly exaggerated but warming up to being ideal.

This would come down to personal preference and likely room response as well. For me, I am not a big fan of this design technique, though the reason to implement it, to invert the peak in the Fletcher-Munson equal loudness countours and "soften" the sound makes sense. From a methodology standpoint, it is similar to the "loudness" setting that boosts bass response at low volumes where we have poor sensitivity to bass. It is sneared at in audiophile land, but there is a solid reason to do it when you can’t turn the volume up.  I would not be surprised if there was a variation in the level of dip in the loudness contours from person to person.

teo_audio1,177 posts10-31-2019 11:52amI find that the most natural and comfortable to listen to speakers are the ones that employ some subtle version of "The BBC Dip".

Highly revealing, spacious, well done lower slope crossovers, fast, tuneful, all of it, with a slight BBC Dip. Clean and warm, as the mix demands. A properly done BBC Dip, in my design experience....has the lowest part of the dip centered around 3.5khz and then goes back up again, and is about 2db deep, overall, as a best potential compromise.

@teo_audio

This means you should never think that a studio monitor speaker is even remotely suitable for neutral and balanced home use. They are emphatically not.

B&w, pmc, atc, kii audio, etc many are used for both.