When I first stared home recording I had an OK pair of speakers from Yamaha. The problem is if you share a house with other people they might not share your enthusiasm for auditioning 40 (or a lot more) kick drums to find just the one you’re looking for or looping two notes for an hour whilst you search for just the right level of reverb.
In fact in my experience unless where you record is soundproofed from the rest of the house they’re going to fall out with your music pretty quickly if you’re using speakers.
So DIY musicians tend to use headphones. I’ll discuss my current headphones in a later Tech article but I think it’s fair to say extended headphone use isn’t great on at least two accounts.
Firstly your ears get tired. No, seriously they do and you’ll start to miss things you would hear when your hearing is sharp and fresh.
Second, due to my seriously advanced years I have to have the headphones up quite loud to compensate for my lack of hearing range. This obviously isn’t great for what’s left of your ears.
The solution is to have decent speakers, a soundproofed room and take regular breaks to let your ears rest.
The speakers I chose are the Adam A7X for three reasons. I needed speakers that would sit on my desk. These do, I bought some good isolator stands to minimise desk hum.
These speakers were, in my opinion, the best of several I listened to at the same time at PMT in Manchester.
They were within the budget I was willing to pay.
That last point is crucial. You can literally spend tens of thousands of pounds on speakers so before you go shopping get your budget sorted.
I now really only use my headphones when I’m recording acoustically so these speakers are used for everything else and I have to say they are great. I don’t do my own mixing and maybe I would need something else if I did, but these Adams are spot on for everything I need to do.