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u2berggeist
15
Sep 5, 2017
Note to people who expect the world at least somewhat logical: This drop is for ONE speaker. Not a pair. ONE. Because a studio somewhere really wants to monitor their audio in mono.
Some clarification: I know that studio monitors can/are sold per speaker. But I've never seen a POWERED studio monitor that didn't come as a pair. Mainly because it doesn't make sense for each speaker to have it's own amp.
FrancD
6
Sep 9, 2017
u2berggeistLots of reference monitors have their own amp, they're active speakers and set up that way for flexibility and ease. Once I got used to it I prefer active over passive for my studio needs.
u2berggeist
15
Sep 10, 2017
FrancDYeah, I understand active monitors vs passive. I also prefer active monitors. This is just the first time I've seen active monitors that have an amp in both (or however many) speakers. My previous experiences have been with one speaker (usually right) housing the amp for both pairs and then a speaker wire connects to a second (left) "passive" unit.
FrancD
6
Sep 11, 2017
u2berggeistAh ok got it. Yea in a lot of the studio monitors that also can double as party/DJ monitors you'll see both of them individually powered. That way if anything bad happens to one monitor it's fairly well isolated from the others It comes in handy for sure ha. I DJ'd at a small private party where they had two 18" PA style monitors and the left side had all the amp gear and the right side had just a plug in. No one could find the connecting cable so it took us over an hour of driving around and digging in boxes until we finally found a cord that wasn't the original, but it worked. I was playing for barely 20 minutes before some drunk guy in full on "She's going to think I'm incredibly impressive" drunk guy mode tried to woo this girl by attemping to jump over the connecting cable that was hanging about 3.5 feet off the ground. We all vehemently told him not to and many of us went farther and expressed how he'd be kicked out either way. He laughed at our little faith and took off at a graceful lope across the living room floor. Then he clipped the the connecting wire, caught all the remaining slack across the top of his shoe, took down both monitors in a massive bang and fuzz and then out of drunk nervousness deadpan introduced himself to me and started to try to ask me if I could teach him sometime. People are weird, brains are weird.
u2berggeistIt makes perfect sense for powered studio reference monitor speakers to each have their own amplifiers. The goal of a monitor is to serve as a reference, so each speaker should be identical, so the amp should be built into each. One never need be concerned which speaker is left or right. And a speaker could be replaced independently if needed. And identical speakers with their own amps could also be used for mono or 5+ channel surround.
xcalibr
2
Oct 7, 2017
u2berggeistI've definitely encountered both single and pair. Generally pairs are single amp in one speaker and a passive second speaker as you described. These tend to be cheaper budget options (cheap mackies, rockvilles etc) or meant to be home bookshelf speakers (i.e. vanatoos). Medium budget to higher end dedicated sound production monitors tend to always be individually amped and sold as singles. This was the case years ago with my m audio bx5s. A couple of the reasons this completely makes sense is that the built in amp in each individual speaker would not only be isolated from each other, but also the space taken up inside the cabinet by said amp would be identical, and thus a pair of these single speakers would always sound consistent. While an active + passive pair probably sounds so close you can't tell.. the true audiophile/sound engineers that claim they can hear the difference, will always clamor for individually amped speakers sold individually like this.
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