Event Opal monitors review by Freemasons – part three
| Posted in Interview, Music Technology
How do Event Opal active studio monitors sound to one of the UK’s most renowned producers? James Wiltshire of Freemasons give us his opinion in part three of his exclusive review.
Yesterday I talked about my first day of using Event Opal monitors. Now, I’m going to go into a little more detail about how the loudspeakers deal with bass – my real reason for buying them. Current trends in heavy side-chaining on certain elements of tracks have created a real problem – the sound of a compressor coming back up to unity every 1/4 beat can create some very odd results, especially if the sound processed has a lot of bass frequencies in it.
Using the Opals, for the first time I could hear the awful results of my not having set the parameters on these effects properly. The terrible out-of-time sub-wobble that I’d put down to bad club systems in the past suddenly appeared in our room, and it made me realise just how much of the bottom octave I’d been missing for the last few years. But what really got me excited was how darn easy it suddenly was to put right. On a few occasions it just meant some playing with the compressor’s release time to get everything singing again. Finally it was easy to place a kick drum!
I finished that first day feeling very happy, but apprehensive. I felt that maybe when I got back the next day things wouldn’t go so well, that it might be the high of having a new piece of kit in the studio that was making everything sound so good again. Well, it’s now been four weeks of solid work and I have to say that I’ve not looked back. Within a week I’d settled into using the Event Opal monitors so well that they’ve become trusted friends.
There is still a standing wave in our room, and getting bigger monitors obviously hasn’t helped that (in fact, it’s made the problem slightly worse). But I’m looking to fix that issue in the coming weeks with Varicoustics tunable bass traps. In the meantime, I actually get excited about turning the speakers on as they’ve added so much value to all the plug-ins that I’ve bought over the years. I find I’m using much narrower Q’s now on EQ as I can actually hear the results in so much detail, and our constant fight to have a clean and punchy bottom end is finally getting somewhere. This may sound like quite a gushing report on them, but I believe that it’s rightly so. I can personally only find one fault with these speakers – the supplied under-mount is absolute pants.
So to summarise my experience I will use an analogy. I have astigmatism in both of my eyes (a distortion to the shape of the lens at the front of the eye), so glasses are a must. Every few years the astigmatism changes axis, and it did so around the same time as my decision to purchase the Opals. The result of this problem is distortion and blurring on everything near and far, so reading computer screens becomes a real problem. Every time I get new glasses, two things happen: first everything seems very odd as my eyes adjust to the new lenses, then a few weeks down the line I wonder how I ever managed before. My experience has been very similar with this pair of Event Opal active monitors.
About Barney Jameson
A contributor, editor and in some cases creator of more music and pro audio magazines than he cares to remember, Barney Jameson is a veteran of writing about gear, and a pretty keen singer songwriter to boot.
Having started his musical education reading old copies of the Melody Maker while riding the tube to University in the mid-nineties, Barney once sang in a band called Sugarstone, troubling record company chequebooks not quite enough to make it a career option. Instead, he achieved his goal of starting a music magazine of his own when he founded Playmusic in the early noughties. Later on, having exploited VIP access to as many festivals as possible, he wrote about the pro audio industry throughout Europe and the Middle East, travelling to far-flung destinations such as Dubai, Doha and Muscat (nice mountains).
As the latest addition to the DV247 team, Barney has big plans. But when he’s not plotting online domination of the musical instrument world, he keeps himself busy writing songs on a battered old acoustic guitar and playing them to audiences in his home town.
Tags: Event monitors, freemasons, James Wiltshire, recording studio monitors
This report fits nicely with my earlier findings. I noticed a bigger difference between my test music CDs. It was a little weird at first to hear how much more different each sounded from the other. I took it that my existing monitors were masking the sound more; making the CDs sound more similar.
The 3D soundstage was also surprising. On Mancini’s “Pink Panther” orchestral track, I can hear the 3D space of the recording stage.
Plenty of low end form the 7.1 ” woofers. Enough so that I had to roll some off when I moved the Opals to one of my other work areas. The EQ controls on the Opals came in very handy.
Ty Ford
Ty Ford
I switched to the Opals after years of production with my trusty Mackie HR824. I was looking for something with a little more detail in the mids and highs however, I was pleasantly shocked with how well the Opals handle low end.
These monitors are the best monitors I have ever heard.
I too had similar experiences as yourself after switching to the Opals!
Now I can really hear the music properly and understand what’s going on.
I love mine and the Mackies are going on Ebay straight away!
Nice review.
D
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