I am an audio engineer from the fair shores of New Zealand. The other day I was presented with an argument, and this argument has since become quite a talking point. It was said that any mix is only as good as the monitors used. After contemplating this controversial idea, I am now wondering whether it's worth spending a lot of cash to get the best monitors available.
David Wade
Editor Paul White replies: The traditional answer is that for good quality recordings, your monitors must always be more accurate than the speakers used by those consumers who ultimately play back your music. If some of those consumers have very good hi‑fi systems, then they may be able to pick up faults in the music that you didn't hear on your less critical monitors. Inaccurate monitoring may also make your mix bass heavy or bass light but, having said all this, it's surprising how well some people can mix using monitors that qualify only as reasonable, providing the mixes are continually compared with commercial work played back over the same system.
Furthermore, problems in the fine detail of a mix may often be located using headphones, so the main role of your monitor speakers is to give your mix an honest frequency response without hyping or hiding anything. Low distortion is important, but you can probably get away with 'good' rather than 'excellent' if you also use your headphones and make direct comparisons with commercial work. Conversely, getting consistently good mixes out of known inaccurate speakers is extremely difficult, so while it may not make sense to buy the most expensive monitors around, you should be aiming for something that has a sensibly flat frequency response, good dispersion characteristics and low distortion.