classical label monitors

Sony, Warner, Polygram, Naxos, Telarc, EMI, Colombia, Decca
Paramount, Nimbus, Sain, Sentinel, ECM, Virgin, Hyperion etc. use ATC - you can find a partial list here here - it is likely that about one third of your modern classical collection (last 30 years) will have been monitored through ATC's.

I missed Chandos in the list above - like I said - most everything done recently.

Wow! No kidding. Huh. ATC. That's impressive.

I'm curious now though... Why ask this in the first place?

Aren't studio monitors not the usual choice for relaxing music listening and for the far more critical needs of the producer & production process?

Aren't studio monitors not the usual choice for relaxing music listening and for the far more critical needs of the producer & production process?

Absolutely. Horses for courses. The majority of systems for home listening tend to be primarily aesthetic looking for relaxing listening. These designs (and the rooms & the position where they are installed) often fall very far short of the standards required for the critical needs of professionals.

Two-seater sports cars with loud engines and no trunk space and no rear seats are certainly not relaxing either and are impractical for taking kids to soccer practices - which is why we have SUV's and ever so popular Dodge Caravan. A studio monitor will only be appreciated by a very small minority within the already small audiophile minority.

Are you suggesting that the studio engineer expects the mix they settle on, to sound predictably different on playback, than what they hear initially? I gather the ATCs are not made for listening and are very analytical compared to a home stereo. Certainly they take into account some preconceived typical speaker voicing. I can't think of why they wouldn't use similiar sounding speakers albeit nearfield etc.
I have read here and elsewhere that they record for playback in a car. Then it would make more sense, I suppose, for them to emulate an average automobile's audio system/acoustics (while running) to make the best mix. Classical music may not be lumped into that thinking.

Perusing pro-audio magazines, books, and web sites it appears that the qualities searched for in a monitor include (1) accuracy (2) resolution so as not to miss flaws (3) reproducible settings when working with the same monitor in another setting and (4) lack of fatigue - so that one can work for many hours.

I see B&W mentioned a lot in CD booklets.

It depends upon the type of music being mixed and assumptions about how it will be played back. For classical it's usually mixed for accuracy. It's similar for jazz. For pop, rap, modern country it can be very different and "compromise" mixes are more common. Remember, large amounts of music is now experienced in a digitally compressed format, a digitally compressed format accompanying video on a computer, thru very cheap headphones, as part of a video game, etc. It really doesn't make that much sense for an artist/producer/engineer to produce highly dynamic, wide frequency music when that's the case.

It's also worth noting that the VERY FIRST thing many (and, I suspect, most of the modern, decently capitalized) studios look for in a monitor is XLR connectivity. They're set up this way for many reasons (the performance advantages of active, balanced speaker designs being only one of them), including reliability, compatibility, and simple legacy. A lot of the pro speakers out there leave much to be desired sonically, so the ATC (a pretty fine product by any measure) stands even taller in that crowd. IMHO the ATC are excellent products, but choosing a home loudspeaker and a studio monitor are, more often than not, two very different excersizes, unless you use active speakers at home. Not that that's a bad idea - just rare.

There are certain applications where passive monitors do pop up in studios (sometimes on the older consoles) and they can be almost anything.

Marty

The PMC website has an impressive "key client list". Not sure how many are classical labels. Funny, they list Polygram New York. Hmmm.
Interesting list.

The PMC website has an impressive "key client list".

And PMC used ATC midrange for years and recently their own clone of ATC's three inch mid dome design. So two of the more popular studio monitor designs happen to share the same mid range (and cross over frequencies).

A link to look at some of the studios.Link.
[http://www.recordproduction.com/welcome_to_the_recording_studio_.htm]