3.4 Speaker Mounting
You’ve probably got your monitors delicately balanced on your console meter bridge, or sitting on
a counter top beside your hard disc editor. Find some music with some real solid low end that you
know well. Try listening to this music with the speaker sitting directly on the mounting surface and
then with it sitting on a thin piece of rubber pad. Hear a difference? Which one sounds more like
the recording should? Does one get tubby, or muddy? Depending on the type of mounting
surface, you may find it beneficial to use a thin layer of flexible material (i.e. Bluetack) beneath
the enclosure. This not only absorbs some vibration, but will help prevent the monitor from
vibrating off of its mounting surface.
3.5 Bass Ports
The Reveal Active monitors’ bass port is located on the back panel. You should keep the back
panels at least 150mm (6”) away from the nearest wall surface to avoid an overblown bass
sound. If you cannot avoid being close to the wall or if you’re using a separate subwoofer, you
may want to consider plugging the port tubes on your near-fields with a closed cell foam-rubber
plug, friction fit for a full seal. Because the ports aren’t needed if the monitor speakers are being
used with a high pass filter, you won’t be losing any bass performance and you can improve the
mid-bass response by plugging the ports.
3.6 Equalization
Our feeling is that you shouldn’t equalize monitors at all; variations in the monitor
response should be fixed through placement (after all, that’s what this manual’s about). But we
realize that equalization is sometimes a necessary evil. If you have a choice of equalizers for
monitor applications, less is more. The fewer the number of filters, the better the equalizer will
sound. A stereo five band parametric is better than a stereo 15 band that is better than a stereo
1/3 octave. You may not realise that in all but one or two brands of 1/3-octave equalizers, all 30
filters are in series. There is a minimum transit time through each filter of some 25 microseconds,
plus just a bit of decay time for each filter. Even with the equalizer set flat, it does not behave like
a straight piece of wire in the time domain. If you don’t need to equalize your monitors, then don’t
hook an equalizer up to them at all.
An important thing to keep in mind if you are equalizing these compact monitors is that they are
not intended to substitute for really large loudspeaker systems you might use for tracking synth
lines, or drum samples. Don’t try to equalize them to sound the same as the 15” monitors you
were listening to in the in the music store. The equalization of your near-fields should be
undertaken with great subtlety. With only the best intentions of correcting some of the placement
related characteristics we’ve talked about here, a subtle bit of reduction in the mid bass where the
console or table top will give you a rise, perhaps a bit of tailoring to taste here or there. As a
general rule for this application, you should never need more than 6dB of control range, and you
should never see two adjacent filters with more than 6dB of difference between them. Over
equalization can reduce system headroom, and introduce phase distortion resulting in greater
problems than cures.
