Hi Lee
I have my Focal alpha monitors for mixing and on the outside i have the Yamaha DXR8's
The DXr 8's are as you know very powerful and the quality down low in my opinion is great. Also nice to know you could hold a decent party with them if so desired.
This also in my view is 100% better than the supplied speakers and boom box for £300. Three Genos's would cover the cost in the future and the DXR's have a 5 year guarantee
Now i am coming to a point to explain what i have been getting up to.
I do not have a massive room space and for some time have been going on about getting the bass right in a square room which is one of the worst scenarios for mixing.
I have treated my room, but still it can still get boomy with the DXR speakers.
It has taken me some time to get where i want and i have made loads of registrations for songs which i can endless tweak when making music.
Yes the EQ is a tricky thing to get right and when we look at it on the Genos it looks a lot different to that on a vst plugin and hard to visualize at first, but we look deep into it and then it gets confusing. Really we have to look at the EQ frequencies as we did when shaping our music years ago with an equalizer on our stereo hi -fi which was easy to visualize with the hardware sliders. Getting to know frequencies is a must.
I have only just realized that my DXR speakers has a switch for front of house which i have on and really that is used for gigs and parties or larger rooms.
I switched the switch down to monitor and the bass frequencies are much better. The quality now is 100%. What a clown i have been. "hey man read the manual" lol!!!
Now i want to go to vst more and start making my own music, but i get side tracked every time when pick up a piece of music and start practicing that like mad.
My playing is getting better, but i want the inventing side to come out
The trouble is i am 70 this year and time is is flying past nowadays ( the Quickening) and live playing is satisfying even though i do not play out and about.
Those Gold settings look really extreme to me. If i start at the flat response and start tweaking i am finding that there is not a great deal of movement of knobs needed.
In my room, i started with the loudness setting and worked from that and also i find that the compresssion setings only boost the loudness.
I still keep tweaking the EQ as it is hard to keep being satisfied.
I looked at a EQ video on You Tube and it looked great from what i could figure out ,but it was all in German.They were explaing the frequencies and how to set them in the zones on the keyboard. If that was in English i think there would be a lot to learn from that.
Some might say, well John, you have been going on for a while and should be used to all of this, but when you have to learn Cubase ,Eq, Compression, and all the other things, you need ten lifetimes to get your head around it all. I started really at 30 years old and it has been quite a task to get as far as i have.
As you know if you start at 5years old ,you are pretty much with it at as a teenager. The brain finds it harder to take in if you start late.
We just have to know that EQ is just a Bass, Mid and treble control as on your home hi-fi with a few extra bands for fine tuning.
Cup of Coffee time
All the best
John