'These monitors tell me way more than any giant pair of speakers I have come across in a control room ever did, and JBL should be making a huge fuss about them — in fact I wish I’d had these years ago.”
Top British producer and mixing engineer Bob Kraushaar has worked with some of the finest artistes over the years, including Pet Shop Boys, Elton John, Tom Jones, Gang Of Four, Gary Barlow and Paul McCartney, having begun his career alongside the legendary Trevor Horn at the highly influential SARM Studios.
Recently engaged on mixing Pet Shops Boys’ The Most Incredible Thing ballet CD and Honey Ryder’s latest album, Bob hasn’t got where he has without developing a finely-attuned set of audio ears.
To achieve perfection, state-of-the-art nearfield monitoring — providing an accurate reference right across the frequency spectrum — is imperative. This month he finally found the missing piece in the jigsaw by purchasing a pair of JBL LSR 4328P and matched JBL LSR4312s subwoofer from JBL resellers, Batmink.
Photo: Bob Kraushaar
These had been recommended by producer Jon O’Mahony, who owns the six-room LA Sound Studios in Acton, where Bob’s Pro Tools studio has been based for the past seven years.
“Instead of traveling around different studios the great advantage here is that I am listening to the same sound every day — there’s no need to adjust to the acoustics of the room,” he says.
His existing monitors provide good detail in the top end and midranges… but all seemed wanting in the lower registers. “The lack of low end definition had been niggling me for a while and I had been looking for the kind of sound the JBL’s deliver. I have tried a lot of different speakers over the years to achieve that but for whatever reason they didn’t work … until I discovered these, and realised just how deep they go.”
In fact Jon O’Mahony had ‘discovered’ the sound on a visit to Ocean Way Nashville Recording Studios recently, and immediately reported his findings to Kraushaar. “They had the same JBLs, and he thought they sounded amazing,” observed the sound engineer.
“John told me that in a nearfield shootout they had won hands down. Initially I was a bit sceptical, as you don’t see many of these in the UK, so I decided to investigate further.”
He contacted Batmink, who in turn arranged for Sound Technology Ltd, JBL’s UK and Ireland distributors, to provide a demo rig for evaluation. It didn’t take Bob Kraushaar any time to make his purchasing decision.
“Speakers either work in a room or they don’t — and the great thing about the JBL monitors is that they have Room Mode Correction (RMC) technology. The system comes with a mic which you plug into a master speaker and it does a frequency sweep and EQ’s it accordingly.”
The RMC automatically analyses and corrects the response of each speaker in the room for absolute accuracy. The inbuilt intelligence means that no matter what the acoustic properties of the environment, the LSR 4328s will deliver an accurate mix. The magnetically shielded, bi-amplified speaker system consists of a 8' polymer coated woofer and 1' soft dome tweeter that outputs 220 watts of perfect sound regardless of the acoustic surroundings.
Optimisation can be through the Harman HiQnet network or USB computer interface via any speaker, the included infra-red remote control — or the calibration software referred to earlier.
After trying several different EQ settings Bob Kraushaar was thoroughly contented. “This system is all about the bottom end and the clarity. It’s extremely warm and deep, clean and informative — with an even tonality at different levels. In fact you can turn them down and they still sound warm.”
In summary, he said, “These monitors tell me way more than any giant pair of speakers I have come across in a control room ever did, and JBL should be making a huge fuss about them — in fact I wish I’d had these years ago.”
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