Monitor MSX5

These days more and more hobby and professional musicians and mix engineers are producing and mixing on headphones. Why? Because the facts are simple: the highest quality studio headphones are much cheaper than mid-range studio monitors, there is no negative influence of room acoustics on the sound, and you don't need to invest heavily into acoustic treatment and damping systems. Good headphones also have an almost linear frequency response starting at the deepest sub-basses, 20 Hz — while only the most expensive speaker systems with sub-woofers in ideally treated rooms can reproduce these frequencies correctly.

But it is a well known fact that it is nearly impossible to mix correctly on headphones only, and to focus your hearing on the sound while wearing cans. Why? Because of physics and the differences between listening on headphones and on speaker systems. When you listen to music on speakers, sound coming from the right speaker is heard not only in the right ear but also in the left ear (with frequency and time distortion/delay of a few milliseconds). The same applies to the left speaker.

Listening on headphones: you hear the left channel only in the left ear and the right channel only in the right ear. You cannot concentrate on frequencies when equalizing, nor on dynamics, stereo width or reverbs. Another big problem of mixing on headphones is the absence of a phantom center.

Left ear = left channel, big gap in the center, right ear = right channel. Listen to any stereo music on headphones and you hear exactly this image — very separated, left channel, then a big black hole (the missing phantom center), then the right channel. Try to start equalizing stereo material — nearly impossible, right? For this reason many professional engineers who mix on headphones "mono-ize" the stereo material (L=R) during headphone mixing. But that is far from ideal.

Is it possible to simulate this phenomenon on headphones with special digital algorithms? Although in real physics everything is much more complicated, we have good news for everyone producing and mixing on headphones. While classic "spatial processors" were developed to enhance music listened to on speakers, after a few years of research we developed a new algorithm/system that does not work purely on the principles of basic spatial processing. G-Sonique Monitor MSX5 moves those principles forward and offers a comfortable and precise way of mixing on your headphones — all algorithms were fine-tuned for professional mixing purposes.

While every studio monitoring system should have a flat frequency response, every set of monitors sounds slightly different. The sound of MSX5 is very neutral and flat, but carries a few sound characteristics of the famous Japanese speakers popular worldwide for their very sharp and cold sound — the ones many renowned engineers describe as "even though they have a very ugly and sharp sound, I like them and use them every day, because if my mix sounds good on them, then it sounds good on everything else".