I have entry level 5 inch monitors and an untreated 3.5 by 4 metre bedroom with a carpet and a bed. I can't drill into walls, landlord's rules. £350 available. Everyone online says treatment first but the no-drilling constraint makes that awkward, and I keep wondering if better monitors would just be the simpler win. Which actually improves my mixes more?
Mild dissent: if your current monitors are genuinely bad — cheap ported plastic things with a hyped bass bump — then treatment won't rescue them, because you'll be treating a room to accurately reveal an inaccurate speaker. What have you got? That changes the answer.
Then they're fine and treatment is the right call. That tier is honest enough that the room is definitely your limiting factor.
They're the entry model from a well known brand, about £250 a pair four years ago. Not terrible, not great.
Split it. £200 on treatment, £120 on a decent pair of monitor stands if you're on a desk, and the rest on a measurement mic. Getting the monitors off the desk surface and up to ear height is a real, audible improvement that costs almost nothing in comparison and people skip it constantly.
Strongly agree on stands. Desk-mounted monitors get a comb-filtered mess from the reflection off the desk surface, and it lands right in the 1-3kHz range where vocals live.
Whatever you buy, spend an evening first on positioning — equilateral triangle, tweeters at ear height, symmetric distances to the side walls. That's free and it's a bigger jump than most £350 purchases.
@rawfileruth · 11mo ago · 3 replies
Treatment, and the no-drilling thing is much less of a barrier than you think. Freestanding panels on cheap mic stands or leaned against the wall behind a bookshelf work almost as well as mounted ones, and you take them with you when you move — which you can't do with landlord goodwill.
For £350 in a room that size I'd do: four 10cm mineral wool panels in fabric, two floor-to-ceiling corner stacks, and use the bed as it is (it's already a big absorber, put it behind your listening position not beside it). That's a bigger change than swapping 5 inch monitors for slightly better 5 inch monitors, which mostly buys you a flatter top end you can't hear properly in an untreated room anyway.
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@rawfileruth · 11mo ago
The gap actually helps — an air gap behind an absorber extends how low it works. A panel 10cm off the wall behaves like a thicker panel. Leaning is fine.
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@semver_sid · 11mo ago
Hadn't considered leaning them or using stands. Does a leaning panel really work or does the gap behind it ruin it?
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