One last time kenjit
These far field monitors you see in photos are used to impress the talent, not to mix or track. They were usually built in with the studio, which was often built 30-40 years ago. In the rare case when the farfields are good enough, such as ATC or sometimes PMC, you will find some studios using them for mixing- but it's rare. Blackbird, UMG, Spotify are a few that come to mind that have such far fields you can mix on.
The near field is the way mixing is done 99% of the time now and has been since engineers had to travel to work in many different studios, not park themselves in just one. The near field idea was simple, don't create so much energy that reflections dominate the sound, sit close to them and you can get a pretty consistent sound in many different rooms that way. The purpose of a nearfield monitor is NOT to be flat, it's to achieve translation and to identify errors in balance and/or details. It so happens that being flat, low distortion and consistent off axis is the best way to get that translation and identify errors.
Nearfield are very similar to what people use at home and near field principles can can be quite useful to the home user. The principle is to sit close, increase the ratio of direct vs reflected sound. It's easy to test this in any room- get yourself in a 3 foot triangle and see. Most people complain about speaker sound are really complaining about what the room does to the speaker. Its a room demo, not a speaker demo.
Certain types of studio monitors (NS10s, Auratones) or older ones with big smiley curves in them (JBL 4311's, etc) are not suitable for home and aren't really a good example of what the modern studio "monitors" look like/sound like anymore, this is the past. Most top level mixers have moved on long ago to ATC 25s or 45s or maybe barefoot or PMC - something that can accomplish dynamics and identify errors better. These speakers sound very good to most of us and are suitable for home (ATC's home version of the 25 is the SCM40; PMC has their equivalents also). In reverse, most hi fi speakers have too limited dynamics as drivers are not built for high heat. Some of them sound okay but just cannot endure the studio world of long term all day and night loud use. Reliability is a big deal when you are on the clock.
Most German pro audio is driven by high end broadcast (by US standards) as defined by the government specification; so Neumann is primarily a speaker designed for the enormous European broadcast world, which often has digital inputs on speakers as a requirement. Don't see them a lot in the US commercial studio market, but I know they sell well to the home studio market where SPL is not a big issue. Yes they are good. But we need dynamics here of over 100dB, maybe up to 106dB, and many broadcast oriented speakers cannot achieve that. They don't need to in meeting their design goal (a guy mixing World Cup isn't about "rocking it out" for his client). A speaker at average 92dB-95dB SPL for 12-15 hours can fry most OEM drivers, or at least send them into severe power compression rendering them useless. This is why ATC builds their own drivers, so they can achieve this. The is also what originally built JBL, they built their own voice coils that could endure very high heat.
In Europe, ATC 's market is equally split between home and studio. In Asia and China, ATC is 95% home audio market. A lot of folks like the idea of a hand made English hi fi system since almost all the old hand made companies are gone. Here, its 95% studio because ATC had bad luck with US hi fi distributors so it was never built up. The idea that ATC is a studio speaker is really more reflective of sales, not reality.
Brad
