Looking for Studio Monitors or EZDrummer Stuff?

[mattbarden]

Hey all, I picked up a couple new additions to my arsenal recently and I wanted to share my findings with you:

 

I got a pair of JBL LSR305 studio monitors a few weeks ago. My 500X sounds fantastic through these things. I was never completely satisfied with the KRK 5's I had before. They did the job but I felt like they could have sounded better. I can hear things through the JBL's that I'd never heard through the KRK's. They've been a big help in dialing in better guitar sounds. Mixing in Reaper got a lot easier with the added clarity too. The sweet spot on them is huge. I don't have a super large mixing room, but I can be sitting pretty much anywhere and they still sound like they should. I have nothing bad to say about these speakers, they are excellent.

 

For the EZDrummer 2 users, check out the Progressive EZX if you haven't already. I had been using Metal Machine prior to this and while it did sound good, it required a fair amount of extra work to get it to sit right in a mix. I've been getting good results with Progressive's DW kit and I really haven't had to do much additional processing to it. I had the same impression here that I did with Metal Machine vs DFH; compared to Metal Machine, DFH sounded thin and papery. Same thing here. Much more body to the sounds in Progressive. A couple things I didn't like about it: The other 2 kits it comes with don't sound as good as the DW does to me, so I'll probably never use them. The next one is kind of nit-picky, but the DW kit loads with 2 sets of stacked cymbals by default and I just don't care for that sound. Thankfully you can swap them out for chinas, so I did.

 

If you're currently looking to upgrade/acquire either of these things (or if you're just a gear hound like me), I hope this information has been helpful to you.