Tannoy Gold 5

I moved to Berlin for work and I missed my home studio setup, which I couldn't bring with me. I didn't want to spend a lot, but wanted something adequate for music listening and fiddling with Ableton Live in an apartment. For the price? Absolutely amazing. I had all sorts of cheap and good monitors in my life, but these tannoy are really impressive. Even without sub they are capable of reproducing a fair amount of bass given the size of the speaker, without ever being unpleasant or undefined in the lowest range. Obviously they cannot reproduce sub frequencies: they start a gentle rolloff at 70Hz, but they're perfectly adequate for most situations other than heavy electronic music or film scoring. Also the staging is very good and I'm perfectly capable of distinguish the position and the distance of every instrument in the mix. The frequency response is good at near field listening levels, and I don't feel like the dynamics are too compressed. Keep in mind though, that these speakers are very sensitive and they do not have an input level padding switch. For this reason if you connect them directly to certain sound cards you'll find that they are very loud, even with the volume knob at 0, it depends on your card output level. Solution? Use a mixer in between or a passive attenuator. I had to pair them with a couple of JTS MA-123 (also bought on thomann) to preserve audio resolution of my sound card. With the attenuators they are killer for a home or portable recording/mixing setup.

These monitors are very pleasant not only to work on but also to listen to music. The overall frequency response is quite flat. As you can expect from a speaker of this size, low-end is not it's strong suit, instead the mid-range is very revealing and forward sounding and the higher frequencies aren't at all harsh. If you are looking for monitors to mix on, I would definitely recommend these. I've only had them for a few days and am really enjoying them. The bass and treble controls allow for greater flexibility in their use. Set them up, measure their response in your room, then EQ them with Sonarworks or REW, and you're quickly in business.