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Thursday July 05, 2007

A Better Alternative to Brüllwürfels

A "Brüllwürfel" translates to english as "yellcube". It's a german play of words for cheap, tinny PC speakers. It ryhmes with "Brühwürfel" which is the german word for stock cubes. You know, those cubes you toss into the soup to make it taste like soup.

When sitting at my desk, I don't have any decent speakers to hear music with, only what's built into my laptop. The standard solution for laptop/PC listening are low-cost active speakers, Brüllwürfels, and their audio quality generally tends to suck.

When noone's listening, I'm trying to create some music with Logic Express (Related) . Same problem here, but the solution space now expands into the wonderful world of studio monitor speakers. So I went shopping.

It turns out that studio monitors are optimized to sound as neutral as possible (which correlates with my personal definition of "good") withing a short range (home studio or desk, both are near-range) and they come with their own built in amplifiers (which are optimized to sound good with the particular speaker). And they are designed with the musician in mind, not some PC-gamer. Here's a good introduction (Related) into the subject.

The german Professional Audio (Related) magazine's review list features quite a few low-cost studio monitor speakers below EUR 200. In particular, Fame (Related) 's 1060 AM speakers earned a "very good" in overall rating and an "outstanding" in price/performance for their class. They are on sale for EUR 99 at Music-Store (Related) , so in they go into my shopping cart.

Professional equipment uses balanced signaling (Related) instead of the consumer audio connections and they typically come with XLR (Related) or 6.35 mm TRS jack (Related) plugs - not your regular audio out connection from your laptop. But since laptop sound chips rarely deliver good quality anyway and because we just saved so much by not having to buy an extra amplifier, we can now invest in a decent D/A converter (Related) .

Most of the computer audio and electronic music companies sell good, USB-powered D/A converter boxes that sound better than any laptop audio-out jack. In my case, I fell in love with the beautiful Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1 (Related) . It's portable, it has a microphone pre-amp and inputs (for podcasting), great audio quality at 192 kHz and 24 Bit with balanced outputs (better quality than standard audio wires), fully programmable controller knob and switches and it's full of good german engineering inside as well. It currently sells at approx. EUR 250 but of course you can find lower cost alternatives if you don't care about recording and just want to feed those monitors.

I can't wait to get the stuff delivered, I'll let you know how it sounds :).

Lesson learned: Don't settle with the consumer stuff, check out what the pros use when faced with a similar problem!

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