DOUG MCBRIDE: Hi. My name is Doug McBride. I own and run Gravity Studios in Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago, and we've been in business 15 years, recording indie rock bands and just bands. I'm here to show you some equipment we work with daily.

So this is the Barefoot MM27 MicroMain. We use these as the mains here at Gravity. They're a unique design that I think is pretty remarkable and we were I believe the second or third studio to jump on the bandwagon when they came out with these, but they're now -- they caught on like wildfire. A huge list of great engineers are trusting these.

They're a unique design because as you'l see at the moment, there're subwoofers, two subwoofers built into each speaker in addition to the drivers an the tweeter so it's basically a full-spectrum system down to 27 Hz, which is pretty remarkable for a speaker this size. The -- we found that the way the speakers are placed is relatively important perhaps because of the subwoofers on the side. In addition to wanting our ears to line up with the tweeters, we like to just basically have our ears line up right here, so we got the speakers on these stands relatively low, and we found that to be really useful.

They also can be used on their sides if necessary. It's hard for me to talk too much in too much detail about the specific technology and its pretty unique stuff, but what I can say is that it's we hear the frequencies so much more clearly that our mixes end up with more dimension and the low end ends up tighter. And first and foremost, mixes translate well to a variety of playback systems much better than they had when we had Genelecs 1031A's which were the common speaker for so long. You know, we still have the Yamaha NS10's because certain engineers they come in here, they really like to have access to them but I really feel that the information covered by these speakers is covered by the Barefoots. I'm happy to proselytize about it because they're pretty transformational. They really take your ability to dissect and hear the effects of equalization, hear compression clearly, hear just full stereo width and frequency spectrum better.

Barefoots have been a huge thing for our studio. First and foremost, you can see the -- on the sides here -- you've got a subwoofer. The other side of the speaker is identical so there's two subwoofers built into each speaker, which is really clever. One of the things that's interesting about that is that they counteract each other such that there's no vibration, so we have these on the Sound Anchor speaker stands that were designed to work with these particular monitors, but for those that put them on like we used to have them on our ¬- over our old Neve, right on the meter bridge, and they didn't move at all, even when they were playing full volume.

I guess I've heard these described as a two-way plus subwoofer rather tan a three-way design. It doesn't really matter what kind of design it is to me. They translate extremely well, and translation is what it's all about as far as I'm concerned. I want to be told the truth by my speakers. So, these -- there's no need for subwoofers with these monitors. They are relatively flat under 28 Hz I believe, and so they present your low end with accuracy that's just tremendous. Barefoot good.