affordable hi fi speakers with flat frequency response

hi
i was wondering if anyone had any great suggestions for something i could find on ebay to buy that would be great for mixing my mixes with. i'm looking for a 3 way system so i can hear all the deep deep lows to the very high highs and something that has a very flat frequency response which is also affordable and not popular. i'm looking for a sleeper.
i saw some fisher hi fi speakers from the 80's which may work. the problem is that i have no experience with this stuff...so one could easily spend thousands of dollars via trial and error when in the end it would have probably been better to just spend the money on the highly inflated high priced studio monitors. please post if you can.
have a great day

maybe a kit exist that cost peanuts but which can totally hang with something that cost thousands more.

what is you budget?

I use line arrays made of good car speakers. I like them. :grin:
They are good for concerts, record monitoring, home theater usage... :grin:
I needed them to work from 80 Hz only, but they are good down to 40 Hz.

Do you have an amplifier ? 3-way , so no nearfield ...

Cheers,

Mike

...and when I need down to 16 Hz I add this beast, also made of car speakers:



At leat I am sure my records sound good in cars.

I've been doing an enormous amount of research into the idea of building my own speakers for monitoring applications. There is so much that goes into the design of good speakers, it's overwhelming, to the point that there are engineers out there who dedicate their entire lives to speaker design.

Have I scared you off yet?

What I'm finding is that in addition to being able to design an appropriate speaker, you also need to be able to test your finished speakers, and before that, test the drivers you buy to make sure they meet spec. This means a good measurement mic, a room that is as acoustically dead as you can make it, and software that is out of most people's price range.

All is not lost, though. There is speaker design and testing software out there for decent prices that works well, depending on what you need, and a Behringer ECM8000 or whatever it's called can be modded into a good-enough-for-government-work measurement mic. That's what the ever-famous Zaph uses, last time I checked.

Now, I plan to build my room before I build or buy any speakers, so at least I can get that part out of the way. I'm also seriously considering using a dedicated computer as a DSP crossover, which would increase the flexibility of my monitoring chain, at the cost of an increased money cost. That same computer could also do my speaker measurements in-room, and allow easy tweaking of the crossover to optimize the system.

Scared yet? No? Good.

Here are some links to help you out:

The ever-famous Zaph:
http://www.zaphaudio.com/
(Zaph, aka John Krutke, has many very good designs, several of which would be usable straight up for studio monitoring, I'm willing to bet.)

GSpeaker speaker design software:
http://gspeakers.sourceforge.net/
(Open Source, free to use, multi-platform. I can't comment on it's overall usefulness and suitability at the moment, though.)

DSP crossover software:
http://www.thuneau.com/

DSP crossover software on the cheap, if you know Linux:
http://www.ludd.luth.se/~torger/brutefir.html
(It's called BruteFIR, and is currently top of my list for what I intend to use, since I'm a Linux geek already.)

The Danish Speakermaniac:
http://www.meta-gizmo.com/Tri/speak/STEEN.html
(A treatise on designing speakers, not for the faint of heart.)

I think that should do for now.

And... Upon rereading your first two posts, I know I took my answer further than you really needed. Still, I think the link to Zaph's site will help you out a lot.

ok i'm not trying to design my own speaker. that is nuts. i don't have them kind of time to devote to learning all about that. i was hoping someone has gone through all kinds of speakers to know which ones arethe best for mixing with. something that is 3 way and very flat.
like maybe taking some fisher monitors that are very flat and were at one time very expensive but are no on ebay for very cheap. then i take some electromagnetic shielding paint and paint the insides so i can have them near my comuter screen. then i just get an amp and amp the monitors and use them for mixing. i was thinking along those kind of lines. people on this place make mics and mic pres and compressors but what about speakers. i think they are just important. and in the end you will need some to be able to mix and master your recordings. if there are any "paint by numbers" DIY kits for awesome reference monitors for cheap...i'm all ears. there has got to be someone here who knows what i'm looking for.

I already asked this question once in the Brewery:

http://www.groupdiy.com/index.php?topic=18876

Some good option came up as well. Maybe this thread will find a few more.

Parts Express offers up a few kits:

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&DID=7&Partnumber=302-924

That one looks good, but it looks like they're phasing out that kit (the other two color variants are listed as "no longer available").

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&DID=7&Partnumber=300-640

That's a nice, cheap kit. I can't say how suitable it might be for monitoring, though.

And I realize now you aren't trying to design anything from scratch. I am, though, because, yes, I am that nuts. Totally off my rocker. :wink:

consul
yes you are nuts. what you are trying to is very very hard.
it takes too much for just a pair of speakers to monitor music with.
but if you ever succeed and it kicks ass and you can make a kit. please let me know

that $149 kit looks very worthwhile.

v, 'shielding paint' wont do shit for electromagnetic fields- only electrostatic. use google if you dont know the difference.

Unfortunately, Fisher speakers from the 80s and beyond weren't anywhere near flat, used cheap drivers and minimal, cruddy crossovers, and in general were only marginally better than Radio Shack. Which is to say, they were crap. I spent most of the 1990s repairing speakers and got to look inside a lot of them.

If you want a small consumer speaker to use as a nearfield, try something like Phase Tech. Not particularly cheap, but remarkably decent. PSB also made some good stuff.

Peace,
Paul

If you want an inexpensivve pair of speakers that sound reasonably decent and are somewhat flat Dynaco A25's can be had for less than
$150 a pair quite often. They're fine as is but a few simple mods and they
will smoke a lot of less than $1k studio monitors. Mine are out in the garage but I've actually considered redeploying them in the studio. And they work great for just general listening too.

PSB and Wharfedale Diamond 8's (2-way) come to mind. You can get the new Wharefadale Diamond 9.1's for pretty cheap.

ebay yourself some Advent 5002 2 ways. These things sound much better than most $600 a pair 3 ways. (Early '80s old school!) :thumb:

These things can be had for a song and will cost more to ship than
to buy.

GARY