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