How many of you producers have a studio subwoofer?
I just found out about 20 minutes ago that I’m getting $300 back from my Federal income tax. Naturally, the first thing that popped into my head was ‘oh sick I can buy some new gear finally!’
How many of y’all have subs with your monitors?
Is it worth it? Obviously, it’s going to cost me more than the $300 that I’m getting back, but that combined with my crappy little student job should be enough.
Are the low-end subs even any good? Please don’t say ‘go to the store and listen to them’ because that’s not an option for me.
The other option I’m considering would be buying a Launchpad or an APC. Any thoughts?
if your room is smalled and untreated forget about the sub. i’ve buy one and just sell few weeks after cause it was just nightmare with bass jumping all over the place
i don’t have sub. however i found that over time you can predict how low frequencies will sound on a 2.1 system even without the sub for monitoring. and i actually came to enjoy having this ability.
it really depends on what your monitors are like… how low can they go? If you’ve got a pair of monitors that can go down to say 40hz then a sub isn’t going to benefit you.
if your monitors cut off at 60-80hz then you might find a sub allows you to hear/feel the lower sub frequencies. But it really depends on how well your room is treated otherwise you’ll find that different sub frequencies will be louder than others (play a C and it’ll be quiet, play a B and you’ll get full-on sub, for example).
you’ll also find that your tunes will lack sub if you monitor with too much sub monitioring, especially at first.
I find it easier to use a decent pair of monitors (I’ve got Mackie HR624’s) with a nice pair of headphones (Beherdynamic DT990’s) and some careful use of a spectrum analyser to compare my mixes against other tunes.
Sub levels are hard to monitor through headphones. Even if your room isn’t treated, a sub at lower volume will give you an idea of the frequency’s relative strength in the mix.
If you are producing tracks in an untreated room, it’s definitely easy to be deceived by the sub’s placement in the mix. But if you are recording or practicing DJ mixes, the sub is important because it is nearly impossible to determine the relative value of bottom frequencies between tracks through headphones, and if you’re relying on metering and headphones (or metering and monitors that don’t cover the bottom end of the frequency), it’s easy to mix into a track that has a weaker bottom end and take all the power out of your mix without realizing it. Or mix into a track that you don’t realize is a lot louder until you play it back on a system with a sub.
Even in an untreated room, with a sub you can hear whether the EQ needs to be adjusted on the bottom end to make your levels even as you mix into the next track.