If you’re building a studio, buy good speakers, or they are better known near-field studio monitors, first.
I’ve got a pair of cheap speakers in the studio that I refuse to get rid of. They’re not here because they sound amazing, they’re here because they look cool. I guess they are also spares! But if you’re putting together a studio and wondering where to spend your money, let me save you a lot of time and frustration. Buy the best speakers you can afford. Not the fanciest microphone. Not the newest audio interface. Not another plugin bundle. Speakers.
Why? Because that’s where you’re going to hear everything you do. You can get away with secondhand gear in a lot of areas. You can find bargains. You can make older equipment work perfectly well. However, none of that matters if you can’t accurately hear what you’re creating. The speakers are your window into the music. If that window is distorted, coloured, or inaccurate, every decision you make while recording, mixing, and possibly mastering is based on bad information.
I’ve known plenty of people who spend weeks crafting a mix on little hi-fi bookshelf speakers. It sounds great in their space, then they play it in the car and suddenly the bass disappears, or the vocals are too loud, or the mids are harsh or flat. What happened? The speakers they mixed on misled them.
A good set of studio monitors doesn’t necessarily make your music sound more exciting. In fact, the opposite is true – they reveal problems, expose mistakes and tell the truth. That’s exactly what you want. If your mix sounds balanced on quality studio monitors, there’s a very good chance it will translate well elsewhere. It’ll work on a laptop, mobile phone, in a car, through headphones and on hi-fi systems. That’s the goal. The listener doesn’t care what equipment you used. They don’t care how expensive your microphone was. They care that the song sounds good wherever they happen to hear it. And that’s why speakers matter so much.
When I look around this studio, there are plenty of places where money could have been saved. There are pieces of gear I’ve bought secondhand. There are pieces of gear that are older than some musicians. There are things that aren’t particularly glamorous. But the speakers? That’s where the investment was best made. Having these, in my case Focul Alpha 80s, transformed the quality of my mixes. It was like putting reading glasses on and a page become crystal clear.
If you’re working with a limited budget, spend your money on speakers first. Listen to lots of music through them and get to know them. Everything else will start falling into place. So yes, I still keep the cheap speakers around because they look cool. But when it’s time to make serious decisions about a mix, I turn to the good ones. Every single time.
