This post may contains traces of audio geekery.
I’m the first person in Australia to get hold of a new monitor speaker called the MUM-6, to use for my mixing/mastering work. They’re designed and assembled by Present Day Production on the outskirts of London. This company consists of a self-proclaimed “fat grumpy mastering engineer”, a younger “tech wizard” and their cat Flop. The technologies underpinning these speakers are a European affair:
Purifi woofers (Danish) – unique crinkled edges that minimise distortion
Bliesma tweeters (German) – made by Stanislav Malikov
Hypex amplifiers (Dutch) – Class D
Valchormat cabinet (Portuguese) – a strong eco-friendly wood product made just outside the amazing village of Nazaré
The sound: fantastic. I was immediately struck by the strength of the stereo imaging. The bass was super tight, just as I had hoped, due to the sealed-cabinet design with its lack of port resonance. The high frequencies had plenty of detail though were a very different flavour to my previous speakers. This is not surprising given the tweeters are based on different physical mechanisms: silk domes instead of AMT ribbons.
Accurate monitoring also relies on room acoustics, so I took the opportunity to fine tune the listening and speaker positions, and the acoustic treatment. This involved several days of testing with Room EQ Wizard, and adding extra home-made bass traps, sewed up by my handy partner Cath. The final tweak was three bands of EQ correction on my interface outputs. I’m very happy with the results: a frequency response at the listening position of +/- 4db from 37Hz upwards based on ⅓ octave smoothing (see below), which is excellent for a home studio. In terms of time-domain performance, the decay times are very short and even with only one significant modal ring down at 48Hz.
I love my MUMs!
