Avantone Pro Active MixCube 5.25 Inches Powered Studio Monitor - Retro Cream, Each

I'm now purchasing a second MixCube to use as my new stereo mains, replacing my much bigger M-Audio M3-8 3 way speakers, after thoroughly enjoying using it as a dedicated mono speaker for six months. What led me to this decision is as follows: As a producer/mixer just starting out the past two years, I've come to realize that the pro audio world is extremely expensive and full of companies trying to sell me snake oil hardware and plugins that I don't need to be successful. I (with some skepticism and doubt, which my suspicions turned out to become reality) originally bought some M-Audio M3-8's two years ago, which seem awesome on paper (they're a 3 way speaker!) at a decent price and sound great (if overhyped a bit) one was a lemon (had significant buzzing) on arrival, then its replacement began suffering intermittent static randomly then now has a persistent high pitch sequel. Funny thing is, M-Audio warranty is only a year, that's right, ONE YEAR, which I think is absurd for something marketed as professional audio. So I'm going to have to figure out what's wrong with the m-audio and fix it myself, they're being nice enough to sell me whatever needed part I need once I figure that out though, but haven't yet provided me an electrical diagram to remotely help me for troubleshooting. Anyways, given the failures of the M-Audios and realizing that they were hyping up my mix a bit too much mentally, and how the MixCube ultimately made my mix translate better, I decided to just replace the working M3-8 and put another MixCube in to use them as my stereo mains (Maybe I'll use the M3-8 as my new mono check speaker or as a buzzy boombox for my tv). I realize that these aren't nearly as 'fun' to listen to, but with how much they translate better to the real world for what consumers listen to, they can't be beat. What really sold me on it was the 5 year warranty and their ethics in approach to making, pricing, and selling their products (they rely on word of mouth instead of blowing a bunch of money on marketing). It's extremely refreshing to come across a company that seems a lot more genuine than the BS companies out there pandering to recording studios with unlimited budgets or to novice producers (like me) that are more easily persuaded by flashy specs of cheap hardware when just starting out but won't stand by their products. Again, M-Audio only has a (very upsetting to find out the hard way) 1 year warranty. What further gives me confidence is the oversized industrial type power supply that looks like it could survive anything, it's the biggest I've seen of any consumer electronics, and I've been working in IT for 16 years. The MixCube is also small enough to easily place anywhere (especially with the built in mic thread, which works awesome), and the lack of bass response makes acoustic decoupling less important than a more bassy speaker. Having only one speaker and one amp means less to go wrong It's about as smooth and flat as you can get for the midrange and is very revealing, Not going to hear bass or high end on this thing, and it's definitely not as 'fun' to listen to, but to me mixes translating better is more important. Looking forward to my new workflow with these in stereo. Also found a picture today with Skrillex using one of these and figured if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me.

Well I've had this thing for one day now and I am in love with it! I mostly produce at night due to my work schedule. My wife and son are sleeping when I come home so I can't really crank the monitors which leaves me producing with headphones. Although I can do a pretty decent job with headphones I always have to tweak it using the monitors the next day. Following that is the ultimate test which of course is the car. I often find myself going back and forth between the car and my studio making slight adjustments here and there. It can get pretty old. I pretty much hate all of my songs by the time I'm done with them because I have to do so many revisions. I tried the Presonus VRM Box first which really did NOTHING for my mixes and it made my master soundcard very upset after about 40 min of usage. Finally got one of these bad boys after using them for a bit at my friends studio. I just re-did the mix down on an older tune of mine (that I actually like) utilizing only my Sennheiser Headphones and ONE Mixcube. The mix sounds 1000 x's better!!! This thing will not tell you squat about sub bass, it just doesn't pick it up which is to be expected. The idea is that this mimics most of your lower quality speakers such as computer speakers, cheap car audio, or maybe even a phone...a good phone. This will not help with your super high end either, it doesn't have that air or crispness that your actual monitors have. However, when it comes to everything inbetween...ITS AMAZING!!! In my headphones I thought that my hats, rides, shakers, percussion, etc sounded pretty balanced but when I switched over to the Avantone it was a totally different response. I balanced all of that on the Avantone and then switched back...SHABANG! Sound perfect now!!!! Same thing for the vocals, pads, and mid bass. Mid bass for me is between about 100 hz and 500 hz. I could really hear the click and punch of the kick and snare too or lack there of and made adjustments while using the Avantone. Again; AMAZING results!!! One final great attribute i will mention about the Mixcube is that I can turn it up a fair amount at night and still not wake anyone up! The lower frequencies are generally what everyone upstairs can hear and this thing does not produce any of those frequencies so I'm good to go! :D As of now I am working with only one Mixcube. I'm not so sure that you need two. I suppose if you want a real stereo image than two would be necessary but...I don't think you need it. I would just use your actual monitors for stereo work and then switch over to this for mono and balance checking. If you are having any of the issues that I mentioned in the beginning...BUY THIS NOW AND LEARN TO LIKE YOUR SONGS AGAIN!!! -T- AKA: LOGAM Drum & Bass Producer

I was sold on the idea of the MixCube by the fact that its predecessor was used as a referenced while mixing Thriller. I am not a Michael Jackson fan but it's difficult to deny the impact of his music. More to the point, this speaker is supposed to replicate "lower quality" speakers on which most music is heard: televisions, computer monitors, cheap headphones, without crossovers and aggressively shelved highs and lows. The concept is brilliant: if the mix sounds good here, it will probably sound good anywhere. I purchased only one, so it doubles as my mono mix reference. Unfortunately after hooking it up, the speaker had no power even the though power supply (transformer) was hot (dissipating heat). My day job is a military radar technician, so I pulled out a multimeter and noted that the power supply was not outputting AC voltage. Opening the power supply, I noted no visual anomalies but rotated the output cable 180 degrees, which restored the output voltage. I *am* now a little concerned about the electrical safety of the power supply, which I will investigate in detail later. I am stationed overseas, so the turnaround time for a replacement power supply isn't practical for me. Once I got it running, it sounded quite a bit worse than I expected, which was awesome! NO bass, very boxy low mids, pretty decent presence in the upper mids, and what sounded like absolutely no information above 10kHz. I haven't officially run a mix on this yet, but I can already tell that this is a handy B speaker to your A speaker(s). I sincerely hope that I'm the only person who has had the power supply problem, as it seems like a legitimate safety concern to me; otherwise this box is 5 stars for what it does.

First of all, if you know what this is and you're doing research to try to decide if you should buy this, the answer is yes, buy it now! I built a studio in my basement four years ago. I spent a lot of time and other stuff on effective sound treatment, equipment, etc. I also bought a few pairs of monitors. The first were KRK Rokit 5 1st gen. I didn't know squat about monitoring and figured those would be good enough. They weren't. I couldn't get anything to translate well without a lot of CD burning and playing around the house, car, etc. When I did manage to get a song right I couldn't ever pinpoint what I'd done so that I could do it again on another song. Each song had a seemingly random tone problem if I took it away from my mixing desk. Next I bought a Yamaha HS10W to use with the KRKs because I always had trouble with the low end. I went with Yamaha because I intended to upgrade my monitors later. KRKs + sub was only a little better. I still had the same tone problems. Finally, I found a used BlueSky MediaDesk and that seems to be much better. But I was *still* missing something and it was driving me crazy. I decided not to spend any more time or money until I had researched this problem to the best of my ability. I got a lot of guidance from Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio by Mike Senior, available here on Amazon. I was missing the Mixcube. I think I read about these three or four months ago but put off getting one. I was very skeptical that something like this could help so much. I had already spent so much time and money that I thought this was the ultimate snake-oil sucker's bait. Well, I was wrong! The Mixcube has made all of the difference in my studio. I also picked up a HOSA Audio Signal Selector so I can A/B/C my monitors. My mixing experience is like night-and-day right away. I started over with my previous mixes and brought up one track at a time A/B ing with the Mixcube and BlueSkys. It's *so easy* to get bass levels and vocals to right in the mix, and with a fraction of the time I was spending before. This is a pretty gushy review and I've only had this for two days. However, I mixed two songs and both translated everywhere immediately. Did I mention that I've been struggling with this issue for years!?! If you've been having similar issues buy this now! Your only regret will be that you didn't do it sooner. In the end maybe the KRKs and sub would've been "good enough" to deliver to mastering if I had had the Mixcube from the beginning. I went back and forth between a Mixcube and a Behritone. Maybe the Behritones would give you similar or good-enough results. However, I finally decided that after everything I've put into this studio and all of the time I spent fighting my mixes, I didn't want to blow it trying to save $100. No regrets here. I'll post back if anything noteworthy happens. EDIT September 22, 2013: Still love it, and still nailing it every time. I'm not saying that I don't decide I need a little more of this or that, but the tonal agony I wrote about earlier vanished when I plugged this in and hasn't come back. In addition, I am a better "mixing engineer" because this has really helped train my ears to what is important in a mix. I put that in quotes because I'm a hardcore hobbyist, and though I've recorded and mixed legit albums for other bands, I'm not in the major or minor leagues. However, about a month ago I spent two days in the local holy-of-holies recording studio, and was jazzed to see that they have two Avantones in their monitoring setup. It was thrilling because I'll never spend the kind of money they spend on their monitoring setup ($100+k?), but when we mix for crap-speakers we're going for the same sound. Since 90% of our customers will be playing our mixes through speakers this bad or worse (e.g. the little speaker on a iPhone, etc.) it's no surprise that many big-shot engineers rely on this speaker to do a great deal of their work.

I find this to be a very useful tool when mixing my home recordings. When I'm unsure about levels in a mix or how to EQ something in the mid-range frequencies, or whether or not my bass instruments can still be heard on a sub-par speaker, my first step these days is to sum my tracks to mono on my monitor controller (which can also easily be done in most DAWs) and flip over to my mix cube. All of a sudden I know which instruments are competing in the mid-range, and competing with each other for volume. It will let you know how ugly your recordings really sound until you fix them! When mixing vocal levels on the mix-cube I find myself turning the vocals down much too low probably due to the mid-range emphasis (just a little quirk nobody warned me about), but it has made my life 10x easier when it comes to making what I consider an acceptable mix. Not the end-all solution for a studio, but definitely an indispensable part of my current set up.

I contemplated several options and researched for a year about grot boxes and how they are used and decided to try this one over all the other options and man, am I glad I did! This is one of the best tools I have acquired. I was skeptical but this works awesome as a mono source to mix on before going to mastering. I was able to cut DAYS off of my mixing be eliminating the need to check them on several other sources. Get your tracks roughed in and run a mono mix to this and mix until it sounds good and your mixes will translate everywhere else!

UPDATE 2024: I finally broke down and bought some auratones and there is no comparison. They blow the Avantones and Behritones out of the water. UPDATE 8/3/2017: After using the Avantone (studio) and Behritone (home) for the last three months, I have noticed my mixes using the Behritone are far superior and translatable—and that's coming from my home studio which is an acoustical nightmare. To be scientific about it, I swapped them out and started using the Behritone in the studio and, sure enough, MUCH better. So if you're trying to decide between the two, I'd say go for the Behritone instead. (I bought the one w/ the woodgrain cabinets, not sure if that matters.) INITIAL REVIEW: The package arrived and the speaker was halfway detached from the cabinet and the chrome border was cracked and bent (see attached pics). And the paint was chipped. After paying what I feel is a pretty exhorbitant amount of money for a single reference monitor, it was disappointing to open the package to find it in such rough shape. After putting it back together, I plugged it in to see if it would work. It did. And since I needed it for a project I'm working on and didn't have time to wait for a replacement, I decided to live w/ the cosmetic (and hopefully not performance) blemishes. In pictures, the Avantones appear to be well-constructed, but up-close-and-personal they're kinda disappointing. I anticipated that the speaker would sound crappy—that's kinda the point. It definitely delivers there. It's the worst sounding speaker I've ever heard. In the end, all I really care about is having a lowest-common-denominator mono reference source, and the Avantones seem to nail that.

Awesome mono mix for studio and portable reference speakers.. Great clarity in the mix but it's sounds true and not hifi.. If it sounds good on here it's gonna be pretty nice just check low end on another set of monitor.. Mono is key get a plug in or monitor control that has mono mix ... Great buy so far