A Better Alternative to "Bruellwuerfel"s

A "Brüllwürfel" translates to english as "yellcube". It's a german play of words for cheap, tinny PC speakers. It ryhmes with "Brühwürfel" which is the german word for stock cubes. You know, those cubes you toss into the soup to make it taste like soup.

When sitting at my desk, I don't have any decent speakers to hear music with, only what's built into my laptop. The standard solution for laptop/PC listening are low-cost active speakers, Brüllwürfels, and their audio quality generally tends to suck.

When noone's listening, I'm trying to create some music with Logic Express. Same problem here, but the solution space now expands into the wonderful world of studio monitor speakers. So I went shopping.

It turns out that studio monitors are optimized to sound as neutral as possible (which correlates with my personal definition of "good") withing a short range (home studio or desk, both are near-range) and they come with their own built in amplifiers (which are optimized to sound good with the particular speaker). And they are designed with the musician in mind, not some PC-gamer. Here's a good introduction into the subject.

The german Professional Audio magazine's review list features quite a few low-cost studio monitor speakers below EUR 200. In particular, Fame's 1060 AM speakers earned a "very good" in overall rating and an "outstanding" in price/performance for their class. They are on sale for EUR 99 at Music-Store, so in they go into my shopping cart.

Professional equipment uses balanced signaling instead of the consumer audio connections and they typically come with XLR or 6.35 mm TRS jack plugs - not your regular audio out connection from your laptop. But since laptop sound chips rarely deliver good quality anyway and because we just saved so much by not having to buy an extra amplifier, we can now invest in a decent D/A converter.

Most of the computer audio and electronic music companies sell good, USB-powered D/A converter boxes that sound better than any laptop audio-out jack. In my case, I fell in love with the beautiful Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1. It's portable, it has a microphone pre-amp and inputs (for podcasting), great audio quality at 192 kHz and 24 Bit with balanced outputs (better quality than standard audio wires), fully programmable controller knob and switches and it's full of good german engineering inside as well. It currently sells at approx. EUR 250 but of course you can find lower cost alternatives if you don't care about recording and just want to feed those monitors.

I can't wait to get the stuff delivered, I'll let you know how it sounds :).

Lesson learned: Don't settle with the consumer stuff, check out what the pros use when faced with a similar problem!

Update (Friday, July 6th): Today the monitor speakers and the audio interface arrived, and I only ordered them wednesday evening. Great mail order service! The speakers are a bit bigger than I expected, but that's actually good as they now sit at the top of a shelf, laying on their sides, creating an extra layer on top of them to place my printer on. The NI Audio Kontrol 1 audio interface is simply amazing: Great quality, nice design, lots of features. The speakers sound excellent: Great detail, good sound stage even though they're only at arm's length, not a single speckle of hum nor noise and lots of power. The whole setup is so good that I can easily hear which songs have been recorded/mixed at high production quality and which ones could need some tinkering here and there. Didn't know I could actually hear that.

I'm now in Brüllwürfel heaven...

Update (Friday, Tuesday, July 17th) Since the original version of the article had a few issues with german "Umlauts" and Feeburner and/or the comment function, I'm reposting this with an Umlaut-less title.

"A Better Alternative to "Bruellwuerfel"s" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-07-17 07:51:24.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
audio bruellwuerfel brüllwürfel monitor speakers
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