KRK V8 Studio Monitors

How good a studio monitor is has always been a subjective matter. This is largely due to the fact that many engineers have their own sonic preferences and probably won’t be drawn to a monitor that lacks an element they personally like such as presence of mids, good bass response, bright top end, thin sound, fat sound, transparency, etc. There are some monitors that will sound nice and vibey with lots of character but they might not be necessarily good for critical mixing where you need to be aware exactly what is happening in your mix. In this regard I would say that one needs to know that the monitors they are mixing on are quite transparent and does not artificially boost or cut frequencies, in other words, a generally flat frequency response.

The KRK V8 studio monitors are the set of studio monitors I am reviewing with regards to the above aspects. I will start off by pointing out that this pair of monitors doesn’t come cheap, setting one back by R12,000.00. Having recently heard the legendary Yamaha NS10s and a bit of a listen to the Genelec 8030’s and the Adam A’7s, it was interesting to hear that the KRKs V8s seemed to have taken the best qualities of these other monitors and combined them all in one housing. These monitor speakers have a nice well rounded sound in the sense that the bass response is not overwhelming but very much present and punchy with its 8” Kevlar woofer. Because of this you will immediately notice the bass content of any track while not overpowering the other frequency bands. I think this is another reason why you find a lot of top Hip-hop and Rnb producers (e.g. Timbaland) working with these in their studios. The high end is not exaggerated at all, making the monitors not have a piercing sound that might start hurting your more sensitive ears during longer listening sessions. These monitors also didn’t have the thinness in sound I got from the NS10s but this for me made it a little bit more difficult to see right through the mix in terms of depth.


These monitors are very loud while being very consistent in sound quality. They deliver 180W RMS. It has a switch to turn on a limiter that protects the speaker when excessively high signals go through it and also has a clip indicator to show when the signal is being clipped (or is distorting).

They are connected using a balanced XLR connection at the input which the noise you could possibly get from unbalanced jacks. The V8s seem to be quite accurate for mixing as what you do during mixing is carried through to other audio systems. I also quite like the balance of the different frequency bands in relation to each other in the sense that tracks have a nice continuous overall balanced sound across the frequency spectrum. Having said that, they have high and low frequency adjustment switches for tweaking their frequency response in different rooms. These monitors strike me as the type that will please different engineers with different tastes (ones who love their bottom end, ones who love their mids pronounced, ones who like their mixes sounding quite bright and those who like their monitors to be vibey and very pleasurable to listen to. I think that they are well worth their price as it has all the above-mentioned elements in just the right amounts.

Review by Amandla Bangeni for Headroom Productions