Small studio monitors

I need a new pair also, so i will be interested in recommendations as well. I have a small pair if Mackey that I already mentioned in the great customer service thread, but want a bigger dog this next time. Wood woof.

NSR

Thanks for taking the time to respond. The Yamahas are a wee bit spendy for me. It would be worth my while going for industry standard monitors if I could crank them up.

In my apartment, I need to be mindful of my neighbours. Domestic powered speakers may be the way to go.

Thanks again.

Edit
The smaller Yamaha HS 5s are within budget. Does anyone have any experience of them?

I can not speak specifically to the HS-5, but I did do comparisons on 8" monitors.


The Yamaha HS-8 was head and shoulders above any other comparably priced monitor in the 8" size.


They were at the top of what I considered my price range, so I waited until I could find the extra $$$ to make the purchase.


Very happy with them.  I'm running them with my PC via a Focusrite 18i8 interface.

I'm interested in your assessment.

What are you using for a preamp? -- I assume you have a mixer of some sort.

I expect you know this, but studio monitors are designed to work well in a nearfield environment. My monitors are no more than three feet from my ear holes.

I read the instructions and they had all sorts of rubbish about distances from walls, corners etc. No pre-amp. No mixer.

I'll be using a MacBook Pro, a Focusrite interface and the monitors.

My lugs will be within 3 feet. 

Look up 'lugs'. It may be a peculiarly Scottish word. You may wish to use it in future to confuse and confound.

For some reason I knew that you Scots call ears lugs -- probably from watching so many whisky reviews.

I'm not very familiar with the Focusrite product but I assume it has a decent DAC. I only ask about the preamp because having to use the speaker's control to adjust the volume is a pain in the ass -- much better to have something right on your desk. But it appears you have it covered.

Good luck. I hope they work out well.

Thanks for the input. I’m unfortunately working with a smaller space.

The good news is that I think the space is workable and I have shiny, new monitors to experiment with and plenty of time to find my sweet spot.

Looks good to me. Might even try some elevation, simple coffee can under each one

I know that at the very least there should be some foam for isolation.

Knocking some pieces of wood together - I’m a klutz- not going to happen.

Thanks for the elevation tips. I’ll do my homework and source some stands.

That should work fine.

I can't imagine what that would accomplish.

There are all kinds of things you could do with room treatment but you'd need to be an acoustic engineer to figure it out and have lot's of money. Experiment with placement until you get it as good as you can and call it done. Just move on with your recording.

If you look closely at the PICs there appears to be some material on each side of each platform to separate the speaker just a bit. 

I think my stands had something as well, but not much.

I’m impressed so far. The stands really help - I’d never bothered with them before. I’ve played around with positioning relative to the rear wall and have found a sweet spot. I haven’t had to play around with any of the monitor settings (yet).

I’m really happy with my choice (informed by this forum). Anything larger and louder would have been overkill. At £256 including the cables, they were money well spent.

At the moment, my greatest joy is an app that lets me control and monitor GarageBand from my iPad Pro. It was free and it allows me to record in a comfy chair not facing a computer screen. I get the terrors when faced with a computer monitor.