for several years i've been using a pair of Tannoy NFM8 II monitors. i would now like to augment these with either the Tannoy PS350 15" powered subwoofer, or a second pair of 2 or 3-way full range speakers with either a 12" or 15" driver.

given the choice of one or the other, which would you go with, and why?

thanks much.

jon

i may slef love having a subwoofer in a control room..
a pair of mackie hr824's with a 15inch mackie sub, or a krk's with a krk S12 sub..
i have event 20/20's in my control room.. they do their job but i need sub bass.. seeing that i produce a lot of r&b and down south hiphop i usually have hard hitting songs or songs with a dumb amount of sub bass..

i'm looking at getting the 15inch event subwoofer or perhaps using the 20/20's as mid field monitors and getting the Blue sky 2.1's..
2 6.5's that sound awesome and a 12inch sub that hits so hard and clean you'd put it anywhere... that combo goes for about $1400...
other than that.. its ebay for me. money is tight right now

I have considered getting the tanoy suf woofer myself to augment my old JBL 4408s. I just want to know what's down there. The rub is I don't much care for recordings with a lot of bass. Maybe I should save my money and roll off everything below 40 HZ.
Ha!
Darius

What does a sub do that the bass on a near field cant. I have Event ASP-8 and I mix all music. What am I missing without a sub?h

subs are useful for figuring out if you accidently have a lot of stuff going on at 30hz which is draggin down your bass. before i had one i made this mistake all the time.

they can be dangerous, because all of a sudden you are hearing all this deep stuff that makes your songs sound more exciting than they really are. also many people dont have systems that give them any information below 65hz, so you should get too obsessive down there.

adding a sub is very hard to do right, i did it, and i think it is all wrong even after a million adjustments. i think i would have been better off just getting bigger monitors (but i do have a space problem). in my monitoring room, the sub seems to function correctly in a very small sweet spot, then it just kinda funks up the rest of the room. since the sweet spot is where i mix, and the rest of the room is where other people sit, it usually doesnt bug me, cause most people think their music sounds great with a way too much 45hz on the bass drum.

this is funny
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/645578.stm

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Is the Event ASP-8 good enough?

do you have some sort of tone generator?

if you do you should run a tone down and see how far down your monitoring goes. make a note of that. if it doesnt get below 60hz, i think you might have a problem. i would feel fine mixing on something that got down to 50hz-55hz or so. fine enough for home recording.

anyway, just remember to cut out everything on all your tracks that falls below your deepest monitoring frequency. my theory, if you cant hear it- DONT USE IT. you will probably hear your bass tighen up too, if you start low cutting everything. its amazing how much extra bass you hear coming from your speakers when you start cutting out bass.

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On a related note....

How well would using headphones - only for the purpose of listening for problems in the low bass frequencies - below the bass reponse of your monitors?

I know not to truely mix with headphones but can you screen for problems when your monitors don't get low enough?

What ever you choose, you should still have a pair of three ways hanging around the studio for playback/reference. I often find that clients are most comfortable (and less bitchy) when listening back on 3ways (even if they are piles of shit).

(i believe this to be the case because alot of dudes who are inexperienced at being in studios don't really understand the control room listening environment which isn't always exactly like that of their living room).

... tacket

quote:

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Originally posted by Mikey Ace:
What does a sub do that the bass on a near field cant. I have Event ASP-8 and I mix all music. What am I missing without a sub?h

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as good and clean as the asp-8's are.. you can't mix subbass with them.. you can really mess them up if you do..

i mix with 20/20's.. and yea ppl that have them and or the asp8's know they hit hard and have a great bass responce.. but its not a sub.. we'
re pushing bass with our mids.. the subwoofer is just for that.. subbass.. add a decent sub and you'll like it. or stick with your current setup. myself, i'd love to have a event 20/20 subwoofer.. its let me know how much bass is really in the song.. that way i don't have to do 2-3 mixes just to get the bass level....but i'm going on and on. i'm at work and i'm waiting to get off.. so i'll get back to this

I mix on JBL4408s. I sent my last cd to a mastering house to manage the bass eq(among other things) to current popular standards. Since it was a country, folky rock genre they didn't master with a lot of deep bass.
The result was a lot better than my final mix.
Darius

thanks to all for the response. i know my monitors very well, but thought i might enhance their range with a sub. but based on suggestions here and with speaking to other folks, it does seem that if the sub is not setup just right, it could cause more problems.

someone else also suggested that perhaps what i was looking for was variety in my monitors. this is a good point, and to that end, i'm going to add a 2nd set of 3-way speakers to my space. partly so i can have a set of "real-world" speakers on hand, and as another forumite said, so that clients can listen to their work on the types of speakers they're more accustomed too.

i'm not sure what speakers i'm going to check into yet, but one possibility arethe towers from NHT, and another is a pair of Tannoy Saturns.

thanks agian. and as usual, if anyone wants to suggest a good pair of full-range "hi-fi" speakers, i would appreciate it very much.

jon

I think using a sub or any speaker capable of creating low frequencies means you need a room that is acoustically very good. I tried using a subs before I installed bass traps and it was a disaster. I never could get it right. I basically got huge dips and peak around 100hz. so I gave up. Since then I've moved into a larger room and installed bass traps. I haven't added subs because I don't feel like I really need them anymore. If I was doing Rap or something with shit loads of low-end bass, I'd defininately want subs. But frankly, getting the room under control seems to make a huge difference in how easy it is to mix the bass frequencies.

Kevin

Curious,

I heard a set up with and w/0 a sub. With the sub it sounded great and full. Questions is wouldn't a sub be misleading? You can easily set add too much bass to amix and not even realize it because the sub can handle it and when played on a car stereo its all bass mud.

How do you figure out the right level for a sub?