What music should I use to set up my Studio Monitors

This is a very good question we got on what is the proper music or audio to use to check placement, levels and eq on Studio Monitors.  There are a lot of CD’s out there that people use to set up rooms.  However if you don’t have the experience using these CD’s they can be tricky.  I like the response from Bob Owsinski’s “The Mixing Engineers Handbook“.

“Listen with source material that you know very well. The only way to judge a monitor is to listen to material that you’re very familiar with and have heard in a lot of different environments. This gives you the necessary reference point to adequately judge what you’re listening to. If you don’t have anything that you’ve recorded yourself that you know inside and out, use a favorite CD that you consider to be well recorded. Remember: don’t use MP3’s here! Use only CD’s or a playback system with an even higher quality 24 bit source like a personal digital recorder. That should give you some idea of the frequency response of the system.

One of the things that I learned when writing speaker reviews for EQ Magazine over the course of five years is that you can easily get used to just about any speaker if you use it enough and learn it’s strengths and weaknesses. It also helps to have a solid sonic reference point that you’re sure of to compare the sound with. For instance, if you know how things sound in your car, then adjust your mixes so they work when you play them there. Believe it or not, that’s still a go-to place for many major mixers to reference their work.”

We’ve even heard stories of studio’s running mixes to car systems, you would be surprised how much you will hear wrong with a mix in a car.