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

What do I use for the Home Studio?

This is one of the most asked questions by my students and peers in the Sound
Engineering community. I would like to make the distinction at the start between the
three types of studios, namely, ‘Home Studio’, ‘Project Studio’ and the ‘Professional Studio’.

Most of my students and music hobbyists would fall into the Home Studio category. At its most basic and at the heart of any good studio would be your PC. This should be a dedicated machine only for Music Production and only loaded with music production software. This will not only help your machine perform better; but also have a lighter load to carry and the only files that get loaded on and pulled off are audio related (WAV., MP3…).This really does work in maintaining the performance of your machine. If you should have any problems there after; it allows you to pinpoint the problematic program or plugins.

Home Studio hobbyists should take care as they are most likely to overspend or under-spend as they don’t have specific requirements; that dictate what they eventually will
buy. A good rule within Sound Engineering is “all input is directly proportional to output.” Basically purchasing gear will never end but you can ensure that you make the right choices and will always be happy if you plan your buy. Industry name brands are just that, brands that have earned their reputation, over a number of years and mean that much to the people who use them and most definitely, in most cases, have earned their pricing. This is what we as Headroom Productions have come to understand with pricing and it works this way most of the time.

Let’s start by looking at sound cards for home studio use.
I find it best to ask at least five questions in order to pinpoint the roles that any piece of equipment will need to fill. These are questions that I use and you can tailor make your own to better fulfill your needs. Try to do your best when answering as this will greatly affect your choice and the amount of time and money you will have to spend on selecting your goods.

Question 1: What am I going to use it for? (Write as many uses as you have)
(This will help determine the number of inputs and outputs you will need)
Question 2: How much do I have to spend? Bottom end (R500-1500); Mid-range (R1500-R5000); High end (R5000-/+R15000).
Don’t feel if you choose low end that it won’t sound good because there are so many different well-priced options out there that will give you what you want.
Question 3: Will there be need for a change in a relatively short time of a year?
This may help justify spending more now the first time around as opposed to forking out even more cash later.
Question 4: Does the sound card support ASIO drivers? (Audio streaming input/output.)
ASIO is one of the best interfaces between an application and the sound card. It gives
us a way to use multiple inputs and outputs together, quite effortlessly. Does this card have a good A to D converters? (Analogue to Digital) because what we are recording or capturing is an analogue sound and it is stored to a digital medium - the hard drive of your PC. The quality of the converters really affects the sound of the recording.
Question 5: What should I be looking for with regard to sample rate and bit depth?
A good rule of thumb would be the higher the sample rate and bit depth, the better.
The higher the sample rate you have, the better the recording is physically represented. Audio is therefore more accurately heard and captured, keeping in mind that CD quality is 44.1 kHz at 16bit.




Two of my most recent sound cards/audio interfaces that I had the pleasure of
testing courtesy of Marshall Music : The ALESIS MultiMix 8USB PROFESSIONAL ALL-IN-ONE MIXER AND AUDIO INTERFACE. This would fall into the mid-price range; it has four Microphone preamplifiers with phantom power. It has a USB connection which connects to your PC and comes with Cubase LE. On listening to the Alesis Multimix I can say very openly that it has a very warm and clean sound and would be perfect for the home studio hobbyist looking to do more high-end work. The down side is that it needs external powering and only comes with Cubase LE and at times, you start to feel like you are limited with Steinberg and Cubase LE however, there's always the option to upgrade to Cubase 4.
For more information about training on Cubase in South Africa, Damelin Bramley is a certified Steinberg training center .

The other system is the Protools Mbox which is much smaller than the Alesis and only has two microphone preamplifiers, both with phantom power it doesn’t have all the buttons and knobs that some of the other units have ,but it does carry the name of Protools with and it definitely has that clean well-rounded dynamic range that we have come to expect from Digi Design. It comes with Protools LE which seems a lot more comprehensive than most of the other LE ranges out there. It is fully USB powered and is very portable.

There are many other types of sound card/interfaces available, however the Protools Mbox and Alesis MultiMix, in my opinion, would be the best value for money. They yield an above-average sound and they do not need to make use of any external gear such as a mixing desk.

The Signal chain starts with a good microphone and is then transferred to the MIC input, known as a microphone preamplifier found on (mixing desks and sound cards with built in preamplifiers.)

These along with the A/D converters is what pushes up the prices of most mixing desks, these two sound cards like most of the new age cards (audio interfaces) make use of built in preamplifiers and A/D converters, making them cheaper than a mixing desk but able to deliver high quality audio.

Your audio sequencer Cubase/Protools, or what ever sequencer it is servers a few rolls one to facilitate the recording, or provide a stable environment in which to run (V.S.T.I’S) virtual studio technology instruments. Used for making music with MIDI, (musical instrument digital interface), this name is not as flattering as the music itself that MIDI manages to produce. The other function audio sequencers are used for is arranging, editing and mixing.
I should also make people aware that Protools has for a very long time, only been available to high-end professional studios. As their high-end systems (TDM(Time-division multiplexing) and HD) are hardware based systems, that do all the number crunching, taking away a great deal of strain from the machine and allowing the O.S (operating system) to function more rapidly. The hardware that a Protools system incorporate works as a copy protection device, preventing piracy both, in their TDM /HD systems as well as their LE systems. A Protools LE system does a lot less number crunching and comes in a lot cheaper, than the TDM/HD systems. Protools has a wide LE range (The Protools Mbox, Digi 002 and now the Digi 003) that is highly recommended for further investigation.

Choosing a PC for audio work

Assuming that budget is a concern here are my recommendations on what to look for when choosing a PC to use for audio recording:

CPU
Of all the components inside the PC, the CPU is by far the most critical. Get the fastest one you can afford. There is a big debate between manufacturers, which we won’t get into. The important thing to look for is ‘dual core’. Computers are only designed to do one thing at a time. The operating system will allocate time to each task running and continuously cycle through each, giving the impression that several programs are running. A dual core system is therefore actually able to do… WOW!!! TWO things at a time. Although this might not seem to make much difference, it does. The general rule is that a machine with two 1.5 GHz CPU’s will perform better than one 3GHz CPU.

RAM
The more you use virtual instruments and samplers, the more RAM you will need. It is recommended to have at least 1Gb for general audio production. You must pay attention to how the RAM will affect the speed of your system. E.g. an Intel P4 CPU can send data to the rest of the system at 800mhz which means that you will need a pair of DDR400 RAM modules (each module can cope with 400mhz) to take advantage of this. Therefore you should buy your RAM in pairs, e.g. if you want 1Gb total RAM, get two 512Mb modules.

HDD
Almost every DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) manufacturer recommends that you have two separate Hard Disk Drives in your system. One disk will have the Operating System and all other software installed on it, and the second will be for audio projects and files. Partitioning a single drive to give you two ‘drive letters’ will not improve performance in any way. The size of these drives will depend on the volume of work you go through. A multitrack project can take up to 4 GB of space, so if you are recording projects of this size everyday, you will need a significant amount of space. It is recommended that you back up all your completed projects on DVD’s and remove them from your Hard Disk to keep them clean.

You will obviously need several other components in your system, DVD writer, good graphics card, but the above mentioned items are the critical ones, that you should spend the most on.

Quincy Jones leaves us another thriller

This is at a live performance that we put on, for Quincy Jones (2006). My business partner Amandla Bangeni to the right of Mr. Jones and I, Mervyn Sigamoney to the left are seen here with a few of our students. These are some of our top achievers that attend the Sound Engineering course that Amandla and I head up at Damelin Bramley situated north of Johannesburg.

Study Protools or Cubase

This will seem as if it was an advert and you would be right in thinking this, but it will give you an idea of were we are and what we do.There are so many different avenues in the Sound Engineering and I try to work in all avenues and focus in a few.
AT Damelin Bramley (where i work by day) our Sound Engineering department brings you new ways of exploring your creativity.
with our hands on Sound Engineering you will be into Live Concerts, Engineering Mixing, System Design and making you the producer engineer .

Our high energy fast paced studio environment, puts you into the world of recording studios.
Pre-production, post-production to final-mix, from start to finish, plan, record and produced tracks in broadcast quality studios fitted with the latest technology and equipment.
Cubase, Pro-tools, Reason,Wavelab and the latest virtual instruments and plug-ins. Put together for sound engineers that understand what the world wants.

A sense of sound is one of the most powerful senses we have. It can bring about emotions, give life to a movie, It can make you hear things you can’t see.
creativity in Sound Engineering.