 Hey, welcome to the Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today we are looking at audio monitors. What are they? Do you need them? And how they can help you make better films? So audio monitors are a specific class of speaker that play the entire range of what is in your recording without accentuating or decreasing any particular part of it. They give a honest representation of the sound as it was recorded, as it's contained in the waveform of the audio. Now musicians use these for mastering and for mixing and I started using them for my filmmaking process for reasons I'll go into and I found them absolutely awesome. The easiest way to understand it is that audio is just like video in the sense that each device you play it back on has its own specific grade. The extreme example is the Beats by Dre headphones where headphones that became really popular through lots of marketing and by massive amplification of the bass. If you use these headphones to mix and add effects to your audio of your film it will sound to you like there's a heap of bass where in reality the headphones are putting that in. It's not in the original file. One of the easiest ways to think about this is that audio monitors play back the sound just like log footage plays back everything that's contained in the file. It doesn't color it or grade it or affect it in any way it gives you a really accurate true representation of what's there in the file. From this you can then mix and master and EQ and add all these kind of things to your audio of your films knowing that when it gets in a cinema or it gets on people's headphones or it gets on someone's television that those different devices will each do their own thing to it but you at least know what's there. As a filmmaker who doesn't have a strong background in audio I always mix my projects just on the Bose computer speakers that I have attached to my iMac. This led to a couple of problems when I went to the Marseille Film Festival a couple of years ago and played Silent City. On the cinema system when I heard my film in the cinema it sounded totally different to what I'd heard on my speakers. And I realized that I needed to get some audio monitors so I understood what was happening and kind of made myself more aware of the audio process. If you watched this channel you probably noticed a couple of weeks ago my audio got a lot better. That's because I picked up a couple of these Adams Audio T5V monitors. This lets me mix and master and EQ the audio even of these YouTube videos in a way that I can add a lot more. I can see a more honest picture and have much more control. They have these awesome ribbon tweeters in the top here and this big five inch cone that gives a really awesome punchy sound. When I first plugged these in and turned these on I started hearing things in my favorite songs and even in the things that I was working on that I just didn't even know were there. You know if you listen to the Dark Knight soundtrack or the Game of Thrones soundtrack you hear whole new instruments. You hear whole new dimensions in sound that you would only hear on a really high quality hi-fi system. There's three main classes of audio monitors. You have your entry level two and three inch speakers. You have these which are the five inch and then you have the kind of thing the seven and eight inch that are post production company or a recording studio would buy. I went with the fives. They are more than enough for what I use them for. But I can still only master it. I only have two of them so I can only master in 2.1. If I wanted to start doing 5.1 projects I'd have to buy two more of these and put them behind me. But that doesn't work for my studio because it's also where I do a lot of shooting like this. I now have an awesome audio setup with the desk that includes my Bose speakers so that I can select between the two of them. I can master something on my monitors and then switch over to the Bose and see how it's going to sound on a more conventional setup. I spend all day at my desk sometimes so I wanted something that had a really cool aesthetic to it. While you can plug audio monitors right into the back of your computer you get a lot better result. You get better sound and more control if you plug them through this thing which is called an audio interface. They're between $50 and $150. They connect to your computer through USB and it also lets you add a microphone to the front if you're going to do voice over or add another instrument if you're going to use MIDI stuff. I mainly use them as a controller for my monitors. One thing to take into account when you're mastering and working with audio monitors as opposed to high-fire speakers or computer speakers is they'll have a distinct lack of bass of what you're used to. You'll hear a much wider range but they'll be much less punch because these don't have a dedicated subwoofer like my Bose speakers. So that's just a little look at audio monitors, how you use them, what they're used for, the benefit that they can bring to your filmmaking. Definitely check out the Adam Audio line. I think they're a really good place to start as well as something that you can bring into a really high-end audio setup and just add a whole new dimension to your audio work as a filmmaker. Thanks very much for watching. Leave your questions in the comments and I will see you next time.