CARL SAFF: My name is Carl Saff. I run a business called Saff Mastering here in Chicago. I’ve been doing mastering on and off for the past eight years since about 2000, and I’ve been full time doing mastering for the past 18 months. The business started out as a part-time venture that I did in my spare time and has evolved into a full-time business, and I’m now happy to say I’m booking several weeks in advance. So, the business has really taken off in the last couple of years, and I’m excited to be doing the work.

Selecting monitors for this room which I don't know how much you can see [LAUGHING] via this angle -- I have a very small room, probably just about as small as it can be and still be good enough for mastering, and it’s not a problem for your room but selecting monitors for this room has not been easy, and originally I started out with a pair of small satellite monitors, just two-way monitors made by Dynaudio, and they were great and I definitely needed a subwoofer to flush out the very lowest octave with those but ultimately really wanted to move to something far more detailed and much closer to the full range but it’s very hard to get full-range speakers that will work in a space this size.

So, when I learned about the PMC IB1’s, I got very excited because it’s a relatively small form factor for a nearly 4” monitor with excellent, excellent bass extension given that, you know, they’re really not that big. I mean normally mastering speakers are frequently they’re much, much larger and there are a few models that you see in a lot of mastering studios but never fit in this room, or if they did fit I would have to sit sufficiently far back from them that the room would just be overwhelmed by them and there wouldn’t be a comfortable way for me to sit in here with clients at the same time.

So, these speakers are really ideal. They are three-way speakers with a tweeter, a dome-shaped mid range that’s extraordinarily detailed. Anything harsh in the mid range immediately jumps to the air, which is very, very helpful in identifying spiky or harsh mid range frequencies, and a very unique flat, hard, piston-like woofer that only PMC makes, and they only make it for a few of their models including this one. And the neat thing about that design is that because it is a very hard unlike, you know, the paper or fabric cones that you often see in other speaker designs, the hard, flat, piston-like woofer in the IB1’s is not prone to breakup at high volumes. Not that I typically monitor at high volumes but it’s something that has a lot of low end information the woofers are gonna work very, very hard, and they’re exceptionally difficult to distort, and so you can get very deep, detailed, precise low end without any distortion whatsoever. Even at high volumes, they’re really remarkable in that regard.

The other thing they have is what’s called a transmission line design which means there’s a channel kind of working it’s way through the back of the speaker, just an air channel that then empties out through the little grilles in the bottom of the speaker, and this adds a little bit more halved in the subwoofer range. It almost acts as a mini-subwoofer within the speaker itself, so the bass extension is far greater than the actual drivers in the unit would allow for, and they’re very, very close to full range, not quite. They roll off right around 40 or 35 Hz, and in a mastering environment you really need to hear it down to about 20 because there’s sometimes problems down there. There’s very rarely music down there but there are sometimes problems down there and so it’s really good to be able to hear that. So, I do augment these speakers with a subwoofer for that very last octave just to make sure that I can hear it and hear any problems down there like rumble or say somebody kicks a mic stand during a live performance, that kind of thing. There’s no missing it with the subwoofer, probably wouldn’t miss it without but I like to have the safety of having that.

But these speakers are about as good as it’s going to get for this space, but if I move to a larger space I would keep them. I think they really, the speakers I’m going to live with for life because I’m really impressed with the detail and yeah, what you want from a mastering monitor is that great sounding music sounds good and bad sounding music immediately sounds awful. You really want to hear the flaws before you hear the music so that you can take the flaws out and then enjoy it. That’s really the goal of mastering. When you get into serious tweaking, it’s all about taking out the bad and leaving only the good, and with these speakers I really feel like I get much closer to that than I ever have with any others setup I’ve had.