A studio monitor system, by its nature, is a system. It’s more than just a pair of speakers. The room, the electronics driving the monitors, the placements, and more can all impact the sound that your monitors produce. Given how picky most of us are about our monitors, it’s interesting that, for many years, few of us worried very much about whether or not our monitors were isolated from their supports. We’d just throw them onto the console’s meter bridge, on stands, on a rack, or even onto a desktop next to a computer monitor and call it good.
However, we began to discover that the interaction of our monitors with whatever they were sitting on did make a difference – I remember once having a problem with a low-mid frequency ringing in one of my studios. Eventually I tracked it down to a resonating gear rack under a studio monitor. Lacking a better solution, I put a computer mouse pad under the speaker, which helped to isolate it.
Now, there are much better solutions, from inexpensive acoustical foam isolators to the Primacoustics Recoil Stabilizers we’re looking at here, which combine dense foam isolation with a heavy metal plate that helps control the inertia of the speaker. (It’s basic physics: when air moves from the front of the speaker, the speaker has a tendency to want to move backward. The heavy plate helps to combat this tendency.)
I currently have two sets of Recoil Stabilizers in my studio: a flat pair that sits under my larger JBL LSR6328 monitors and an angled pair that supports my Focal Solo 6 Be monitors. I couldn’t be happier with these isolators. I remember hearing them first at an AES (Audio Engineering Society) convention in New York. I was surprised at how much of a difference they made – it was clearly audible even on a noisy trade show floor. But in my own studio, I was even more impressed. The bottom end tightened up and became clearer, there was more clarity and depth in the midrange, and the imaging was better. In other words, everything sounded better!
I highly recommend checking out a set of Recoil Stabilizers. It’s an investment that will instantly pay off in better monitoring in your studio. It comes down to this: if you can hear better, you’re going to make better recordings, mixes, and masters. And that’s what it’s all about.