BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire. I'm Bill Holland, and you'll notice behind me the Truth B2031A monitors from Behringer. Now, these are active studio monitors meaning they're self-powered, they do not require a separate amp for you to get them. They come as a pair so purchasing these means you automatically have monitoring setup for your studio. But the question a lot of people ask, of course, is, "Are these appropriate for what I'm doing?" Now, I'll tell you right now this is a beginner's monitor. This is, "I don't have a lot of money. I need something to monitor off of."

Our in-studio monitors we have Mackies, we have Rolands, and we recently received these. These seem to hold up alright so far, but I've heard a lot of things online about them breaking, the tweeters going out, that kind of thing. So, that's one thing to be warned about with this purchase. However, it's cheaper than buying other alternatives, so if you're going to buy them for a year or two and then replace them, it might not be a bad move for a first pair of monitors. But if you're the kind of person who wants to do it right the first time, you know you're going to be using these over and over again then yeah it makes sense to go ahead and get the good state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line monitors. But let's take a look at the specs on these, and I'll walk you through those real quick and give you a rough idea of what you're looking at when you're buying one of these.

So as I said before, these are two-way monitors. They're bi-amplified which means you have a 75-watt and a 35-watt amp, each powering a separate tweeter and woofer, so there's a separate signal going to each. And what's that going to do, there's a limiter hooked up to both of these and it will separate frequencies so that you're getting the optimal flat frequency response from the treble and you'll gain the optimal bass frequencies from the woofer, and again bi-amped so you're having both of these controlled separately by their own amp.

Behringer has also laid claims to a sweet spot technology called wave guide that's supposedly creates a better sweet spot than most monitors. Now, one thing to keep in mind when reading things like that is that every company has their own patented technology that they like to throw around, so I don't know what the specific difference is. All I know is that they still sound good. We have played them with Logic and we played some music on them and they sound fine. I think it's more of an issue of will these hold up over time.

Now, I'm sure that if you're buying this on your favorite e-commerce site or guitar store, you're going to be in the building and you're going to say, "Well okay, I don't know what a Linquitz-Riley filter is. I don't know what that does, and I don't even know what active crossover network is." Let me explain this pretty quickly. Basicallly, here's your speaker, right? See that? Okay. See this thing on the back -- on the front? You've got your woofer and your tweeter. On the back, this is your power amp, and inside of that is the active crossover network. The Linquitz-Riley filters are inside of this, and essentially what they'd do is they are your limiters that are filtering out unwanted frequencies to provide a flat frequency response so you get the closest thing to what the sound's going to sound like without being altered. One thing to note is that on most commercial systems, they are actually sweetened to improve the sound and make sound sound the best they can possibly can, and frankly, in your studio monitor, you don't want that. You want it to sound flat so that you make it sound as good as it possibly can at the source, and frankly what are you doing monitoring off of your Pioneer system you bought when you're in high school anyway?

One thing to note as I'm holding this is that you're going to ask grandma for these for Christmas, let her know that you're picking them up because they're pretty heavy. We actually have recordings by The Roots and by Shiny Toy Guns, their actual mix sessions, and they sound really good coming out of Logic. If you want to test them out for yourself with the monitors, if you have Logic 8, you can open those projects and go back and look at it.

For the moment, let's take at a look at the back of this thing and see what other features come with it.