Meeting Topic: Demonstration of Genelec monitoring speakers. Measuring room acoustics, calibrating your speakers to optimize their performance in different spaces and picking the best placement.
Moderator Name: Cameron Smith, President of NESCOM AES Chapter
Speaker Name: Bruce Bartone, National Sales Manager for Genelec and Paul Stewart Product Specialist for Genelec
Other business or activities at the meeting: Last semester's Pro Tools 2 class played a recording that they completed mixing last week after working on it for three months. The recording was done for the Shure Fantastic Scholastic Recording Competition.
Meeting Location: Bangor, ME, USA
Because of limited space, this meeting was members only. Cameron introduced Paul Stewart and Bruce Bartone. They started out by doing some demonstrations of how speaker placement and room acoustics immensely affect the way we monitor audio. They gave a history of Genelec, and detailed the extent of their product line, all of which is basically top of the line active monitoring speakers. Some interesting points that they talked about were:
-The difference between surround monitoring for film and for music. Apparently for film the rear speakers are used more for a sense of ambience, and the center front speaker is used for the voice over. In music there really isn't an established standard, so you may have instruments or vocals in the rear speakers that you want to sound just as loud and close as your front speakers. Because of this, for monitoring for film, you may want to have your rear speakers farther back, and for music, closer.
-They also talked about setting your speakers sideways when you monitor. According to them, if your speaker has say a two way crossover, between the two speakers there is a sweet spot. If the speakers are set on a vertical plane, you can move on a horizontal plane back and forth, and not hear a whole lot of change. If the speakers are on a horizontal plane, and you move horizontally, you will quickly move away from the sweet spot, and the sound from one speaker will reach you quicker than from the other speaker.
-There was a lot of fascinating talk about speaker placement and room acoustics, and ideal setups and bad setups. How to control some of the problems you may have in different rooms, etc.
At the end I think the message everyone came away with, is that to get a good sounding mix, you must have quality speakers, they must be well placed, and you need to deal with any acoustical problems that your monitoring room has.
