Programming sounds for small speakers

[Theo Verelst]

While undergoing more trying out of corrective effects for my Kurzweil, I couldn't help but notice what I've noticed elsewhere too, including in all kinds of demos: sounds are often made with certain types of small speakers in mind.

 

I am aware of being potentially a bit of a snob about full range (lowest to the highest frequencies) and preferably as neutral as possible amplification. In some senses that can be achieved by headphones, and most originals (before they were potentially broken before ending up on CD) I think were pretty much made to sound "neutral" on a good sound system. Nothing all too special about the general HiFi thoughts (and even the actual norms thought they started in the 1950s).

 

Say you have a keyboard and some nice home speakers, it'd sound reasonable to want sounds on your little or big keyboard that work properly with those speakers. Of course there are like a zillion ways to do that if you have the right mix and sound generator controls, but my point is that usually this is a hidden subject, and in some synths (like the Kurzweils) there are profoundly deep (and annoying) and varied ways of changing all kinds of sound properties that make for a great variety of "sound system" match and/or spoil effects.

 

You can argue, well mostly I just use an equalizer to hump up the bass a bit and perfectly adjust some honky-ness, but unfortunately the amount of tunings required to compensate for all kinds of speaker effects and distortions is much bigger than that. So once more I'm complaining that a lot of distortion is built in many sounds because that makes them (probably) sound a certain way acceptable on various (smaller) speaker systems.

 

I'm all for a "neutral" sound, which probably is in line with the big analogs more than most other sounds, even if the bigger systems in the studio and as PA have their own characteristics and distortion, they probably are a better way to tune sounds to work nice than small "studio" speakers.

 

T.

 

[johnchop]

If you're intending to record a tune using only one synth sound, I guess you could obsess about this.

 

Otherwise, the synths have to sit in a mix with everything else, alongside dobro and djembe, or bagpipes and picolos, or whatever.

 

EQ was created for a reason.