thoughts on mackie HR824's?

[seb]

hi.

these have currently dropped in price to 2 grand.
just wanted some opinions if people liked them or not, or are they just another middle of the road, mid priced speaker.

thanks for your input

seb

[davemc]

Monitors are a very personal thing. I would see if you can get some to try.
Personally I found the Mackies way to hyped to mix on for me, I would look at the Adam A7, JBL LSR's, Genelec's and Dynaudio BM5a in that price range as well. Really see what you can find and try and like

[Linear]

I find the Mackie's too scooped in the middle. And the bottom end seems too large and not very tight. Kind of the polar opposite to the NS10 really, with a piercing midrange and no bottom at all.

I'm a Focal convert. Check out the Solo6 or Twin6. Unbelievable monitor for far less than silly money (but i guess it depends how you define silly money - Rick? maybe a figure you don't understand?)

I saw his new subwoofer cone yesterday - it's large enough to park your car under and should have it's own postcode.

Chris

[Peter Knight]

Rick thinks they're good - I remember he said so on the old phorum.


LOL

[heathen]

I never liked the Mackies, I bought a pair of Event asp8's last year, everything is translating quite well with these, $2000 a pair.

[rick]

lots of my clients have mackie monitors and wether it is the owners or the speakers you can never be sure
but as a generalisation the mixes people bring in that are off mackies are way better then the mixes i get of those little genlecs and lets just not talk about how i feel about krks.
i am hot and cold about the mixes i get off dyns,
as for that bass speaker i was showing you chris you have to put things in perspective
my new system will run 4 of them !

[mickeyb]

As an owner of KRK V8s Rick I would be happy to hear the bad news. They were one of my first and earliest purchases.

[chris p]

I thinking of making myself up a pair of DIY monitors based around a single full range driver (ie no crossover needed). Plenty of audiophile sites rave about the ones I have in mind, but it has got me thinking as to what distinguishes a great mix/master monitor from a great lounge (or, with a nod to Rick, car) speaker.

Seb, I hope you don't mind me hijacking your thread a little, but I'd be interested in the phorum's views on this question. My ranked list of monitor qualities would be along the lines:

(1) Soundstaging (the ability to create the illusion of being there)
(2) Accuracy (is a 0db X Khz tone reproduced at X Khz 0db)
(3) WOW factor - I don't know how to describe this, but its the ability to reproduce the emotion of a song
(4) Bandwidth (lowest to highest frequencies that are accurate to within a given db)
(5) Sensitivity (ie dynamic range)
(6) Loudness
(7) Looks

The cynic in me says most home speakers are sold with the reverse priorities. My guess is that a home speaker could probably demote (2) down the list, and of course (6) and (7) would need to be ranked higher.

My DIY project would look to score highly in (1), (2) and (3). (4) is a problem for full range drivers, but I should get 60-70Hz to 30KHzish at -3db. The good news is that high accuracy can create good lower bass illusion from the harmonics, but it I start doing dub I'll need to consider a subwoofer. Sensitivity (5) I can get to about 84db-88db. Not as high as some drivers, again that's a price to pay. (6) is a killer - I'm looking at around max 50W per channel RMS, but I'll be sitting in front of these for long periods of time, so that's a very livable number for my ears. (7) - well, I WAS going to mount the driver in 10mm iridium sheeting, but then I discovered MDF!

[Andrew]

Hi Chris,

I'm not sure that you can get all this in a single driver? I could be wrong but from what I've seen of full range drivers you'd probably have to add some passive parts to deal with cone break-up at higher frequencies. It would probably have some non-linearalities/distortion trying to reproduce the entire bandwidth.

Hope this doesn't sound like I'm bagging full range speakers cause I'm currently building one, not for monitoring though.

[chris p]

Indeed Andrew, all speakers/drivers are an exercise in compromise, and the full range ones are no different. Its just a question of what compromises you make or accept. For me, the question is whether for mix monitors, the advantages of the crossover-less design are more important than the limitations of the full-range driver. And hence my question as to what others think are the most important (= do not compromise) aspects for a mix monitor.

Do you mind my asking which one you are building? I'm looking at a few driver / design combinations at the moment, and would welcome new ideas.

[Andrew]

Yeah I'm building a small line array for a echoey room in a live situation. The driver has a high sensitivity but not suited to monitor applications. I'll be adding crossover parts to get rid of it 'shout' effect and doing a few other things to improve it. You must have a nice driver in mind go against the hr824?

If your after some more info I'd check out zaph - audio dot c0m has a good write up about putting a full range speaker together.

hhhmm I should probably say as well that I'm not at all keen on line arrays but they do tend to work fairly well in reverberent enviroments.

[Ausrock]

You must have a nice driver in mind go against the hr824?

Somewhere on the wild, wild world of the web there was a discussion about the Wackies by people far more knowledgeable than me......one thing that sticks in mind is the general opinion about the the 824's is that they have a noticable hi-fi component to their character