Audio Recording

One of the most difficult things to check is the bass frequencies of your studio related monitors (whether it is near field, subwoofer or headphones). If you are mixing or mastering audio in your home studio; it is highly recommended that you will be able to hear and feel the sub-woofer frequencies from 20Hz to 70Hz and then the rest of the bass frequencies from 70Hz all the way to 200Hz.

Precisely the bass frequencies are commonly assigned to 20Hz to 200Hz range. These frequency ranges are audible by the human ear; as we all know that the audio frequency range is from 20Hz to 20,000Hz.

If you have monitor in your home studio that does not have sub-woofer set, then things can be very complicated because you will not be able to mix the sub-woofer bass frequencies properly (even impossible) which are highly critical in pop and rock genre.

So if ever you have purchased or acquired a studio monitor but do not know how to check whether it can handle or play subwoofer frequencies; you can follow these procedures to know whether your monitor is enough to playback subwoofer bass frequencies or you need to buy a a new sub-woofer system:

Step1. Download the low frequency bass audio test file here (right click and save as): http://www.audiorecording.me/audiosamples/audiocheck.net_frequencychecklow.wav

Source of file: http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_frequencychecklow.php

It is a wav file by the way and the file size of that test audio is around 3MB.

Step2: Turn on your monitors and configure the following:

a. Set the audio player you used to average volume (for example if the volume scale is from 1 to 10, set it to 5).

b. Turn off any equalizers you are using. You should set everything “flat” or no EQ applied.

c.) If the monitor has a volume control, set to average volume (turn the volume knob to its middle setting for example).

d.) Load the test bass sound audio file that you just downloaded to your audio player.

e.) Now start playing, a voice over of a person will mentioned the frequency to be tested. It starts with 10Hz and ends with 200Hz.

How to interpret the test results? You do not need a subwoofer IF:

a.) You start to feel 20Hz when being played even it sounds weak it is OK.
b.) 45 to 65Hz should be STRONG enough to be considered loud in your monitor when being played. If during the playback of these frequencies, you hear it VERY weak, you need a subwoofer.
c.) Normal monitors (like the hi-fi ones, no-subwoofer included) should play the bass frequencies of 80Hz and above really well.

If during the playback of 80Hz to 100Hz and it still sounds really weak, you even need a new monitor that can able to reproduce bass frequencies really well.