I have some mackie hr824's, they are great speakers but they need to be setup in a room that has had its acoustics tamed.

How are the acoustics in your room where you use the mackies? Have you got deticated speaker stands? Do you have bass trapping? Are the speakers near a corner of the room? How have you got the switches on the back of the speakers setup?

If the bass on other speakers is distorted at high volumes it could mean a number of things. 1) the speakers you are testing on suck 2) you have mixed the bass / sub freq' relatively too high in volume in comparison to other sounds in the mix.

Thanks for the reply gk_nz. I think much of my problem lies in the answers to your questions.

The speakers are in the corners of a room on dedicated stands with speaker cushions. However the room is very small, maybe 10ft wide. The speakers are about 4 to 5 feet from my ears. Unfortunately this is the only room in my house to accomodate my setup so I must make the best of it.

As for the switches in the back, acoustic space is set to quarter space A, Low freq is normal, high freq is normal, and power mode is auto on.

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I don't think it's that they can handle so much low end.. I think it's that they have really weak low end so you're over boosting to compensate.. IMO you need a sub.. get the hrs-120 sub made for them...

and yea i use them.

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I use my hr824's with an HRS120 sub. I cut the low end bass frequency off on the hr824 otherwise the bass is overwhelming (obviously). I get similar bass issues. The Mackies are so warm, punchy & detailed. This is a problem because other systems can not recreate the sounds the mackies can, so as you have found out, they distort or are too bass heavy. The only way to combat this is do exactly what you have already been doing: to listen to your song on various other systems like care stereos, headphones and home systems, then it is a matter of tweeking your mix to compensate; unfortunately it usually means you have to strip back the bass that sounds so nice on the Mackies.

Also, as already stated, accoustics may be part of the problem as the size & shape of your room can effect sound. EG: A sub in a corner works better than one in the centre of the room etc. Your near feild mackies, which I assume are on your desk, may be too far away from the walls to bounce off the low end waves, so the bass might be stronger than you realise.

I got my HRS120 sub a while after I the hr824's. I had to remix alot of my tunes when I got the HRS120 because they were very bass heavy. The sub can go down to around 19Hz where as the monitors only go down to 37Hz. I used to turn up the bass not realising that I was missing some lower frequencies. Maybe this is what is also happening with you?

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when i tested the mackies i found they are very bright sounding and did not have a very bassy sound. when compaired to some quested 8" monitors the mackies really were lower in the bass dept. maybe try lowering the bassy parts of your mix and listen again on the other systems.

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I thought HR824s were supposed to be bassy as hell. So I would have thought the opposite effect would happen - that if you have bassy speakers you would turn out bass light mixes because you can hear so much bass on the 824s that you don't need to hype it up.

On the other hand, I've mixed on shitty guild wars headphones with no bass at all and nearly all of the sounds I make on them are bass heavy. Because I'm mixing without hearing any bass I tend to amp it up until I can hear it. But if you can hear a bit of bass on those headphones you know you have overcompensated because if you play it on a decent soundsystem with a sub, it will sound horrendously bassy.

wow, i thought i was the only one!



yeah i find that i have to tame everything in my mix to make it sound decent on listening speakers... they simply do not translate into the real world... i believe the point of these monitors is for accuracy and flatness



i recall figuring this out when i listened to some pro tracks (pryda tracks to be specific) on my hr824s and thought to myself.... "wow, the life has been sucked out of this song... big time"


so yeah, this is just something that comes with practice.. you need to know your monitors and how they translate.... its a total pain in the ass... but it is just another one of life's situations where you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

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Interesting since the HR824 was going to be my next purchase. I may have to rethink that if it's got bass problems.

I'm not sure that's the case though. Derivative: they're not supposed to be "bassy as hell", they're supposed to be flat. So I'd tend to believe that you need a sub to produce properly with them (as with just about any studio monitors in or below that price range).

I've had the same issue with my regular speakers - one day I accidentally hit the switch on my receiver that turned the sub off and didn't realize it for a couple of days; turned out that the mix I ended up producing had brutally distorted and mashy bass. Of course those speakers aren't studio monitors, but even studio monitors don't go as low as a sub.

Personally, I'm already in the habit of doing A/B mixes (speakers / monitoring cans), so if I got studio monitors it would just be an A/B/C. I think the problem is that people expect to be able to just ignore these issues once they get studio monitors, which really isn't the case; they're just another reference point for the mix.

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I like turning my sub on and off with my hr824's cause I don't have the hrs120 I just use a velodyne cinema sub, I like to start with the sub off and turn it on later when i'm craving more bass. I don't think there's any way I could work with them without a sub, they are really bass light, I used to clip them all the time trying to hear the bass and the high end would hurt my ears before I got the sub.. now I never clip ever. make sure you can afford the sub with them if you're gonna go for em.

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I used the hr824 for postproduction for over a year, and one of my best friend has them for a real long time. Now I can say that with certainty,
These speakers flatter. Everybody I know has had this issue, there are ways to get around it like having a second pair of speaker.

I personally don't like them, i just can compare them to any good monitor like dynaudio.

the 824 are more midfiled than nearfield in my opinion so in a small room there is no need for them. the bigger the woofer the less responsive therefore you loose detail , it might sound good but its not accurate. Now if you had dynaudio bm 6 you would have a very good sounding monitor, that is accurate and pleasant to hear. so you really can't go wrong with it. I used the bm6 in the worst room with the minimum side effect.

My advice to you sell your mackie and get a nice pair of bm6 mark1, they have a really well defined bass.

I dont even know how you guys work in a studio without a sub....I turned my sub down the other day to see what happens and i literally thought something was wrong with my monitors....its weird how you ears get used to things.....it sounded like an a.m. radio ...under water....but nothing was wrong with them..