Review: Yamaha HS5

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Today we are reviewing an interesting pair of studio monitors, part of a wide range that features several sizes and wattages: Yamaha HS5!

In a market that proposes self proclaimed mixing level monitors for all price tags, Yamaha HS5 are in my opinion the entry level studio monitors to begin mixing with a sufficient degree of realism (and for realism I mean that a mix made through these monitors translates well also in other systems, such as car stereo, mp3 player, pc speakers and so on).
Mixing with cheap monitors that doesn't guarantee a good degree of realism instead means only one thing: the mix will sound well only from there, and as soon as you try to play the song somewhere else, it will sound completely unbalanced, with some parts of the mix too loud and others too quiet.

Here are some good criteria to keep in mind when choosing a pair of mixing monitors:

- the size of the speaker: the bigger, the more the bass area is represented well in the spectrum, but beware because some speakers can over emphasize it. 5 inches is a good starting point, below this size, the frequencies that are cut away are too many (arriving also to the mid area).

- the wattage: 70w as per these speakers is a lot, and it grants an impressive headroom. Also lower wattages are good, since the ideal mixing volume is the conversation level to limit ear fatigue, but beware of excessively low wattage monitors (like 10w), because in order to hear decently you will have to crank them, ruining the quality of the reproduction. To mix and master we need perfect clarity and headroom.

- the adaptability to the room: this is a blog about home recording, which means that most of our readers are bedroom producers, or enthusiasts that doesn't have a perfectly treated mixing room.
Some monitors, included these Yamaha, features a low and high frequencies equalizer to adapt the response of the monitor to our room, allowing us to limit the lower resonances or work on the high end to make the details pop out more or less, according to our necessity.

In conclusion I can't but recommend these speakers: they have the best price for what they offer, and they sound extremely clean and detailed; since I am using them the quality of my mixes has increased, and compared to the devices I was using before is like twice as easy to find the right balance.
Thumbs up!


Specs taken from the website:


- 2-way bass-reflex bi-amplified nearfield studio monitor with 5" cone woofer and 1" dome tweeter

- 54Hz - 30kHz frequency response

- 45W LF plus 25W HF bi-amp system for high-performance 70W power amplification

- ROOM CONTROL and HIGH TRIM response controls

- XLR and TRS phone jack inputs accept balanced or unbalanced signals

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Video day!

Hello everyone!

I have updated all the download links in the website and created two videos related to two previous articles, and I have updated them:

Review: Boss Katana Head (With 2 video samples!)

and

How to create guitar cab impulses from a song (free plugins and IR included!) PART 1/2

so now you can hear a direct usb recording sample for the Boss Katana and a sample made with the impulse created for the tutorial, free to download, which I find it's pretty realistic.

Let us know what you think!

Cheers!

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Guide to buy a guitar for around 500€ / 500$ PART 3/3

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Probably if you are looking in this price range you are searching for used guitars. Used guitars are extremly tricky by some point of view. We must consider two types of used guitar: the vintage and the more recent ones, because either way we are going to lose something.

Vintage guitars:

Vintage doesn’t necessarily mean good. Old Gibsons are famous for their warm sound and incredible manufacture but they cost three times what you want to spend.

If you are searching for a vintage guitar for 500$ or less you must look at some strange and rare brand that really few know. Especially in Japan from mid 70s to mid 80s a lot of brand were born. The economic boom of the Japanese industry hit also the instrument market, so you can easly find labels as Cimar, Tokay, Greco, Ariaand Vantageon the online shops, selled by other people. What makes this guitars so special? Some of these brands were produced in the same factories used by Gibson and Fender to produce their models in that era in Japan so the same hands that have built a Les Paul Custom probably have built also an Aria Guitar or a Greco one. If you are lucky enough to find and know exactly that the guitar was produced in one of these factories you can be pretty sure that the manufacturing and production are great, and most of the times it equals to the most prestigous ones.

Wood can easly be extremely better than any wood you can find now on guitars of the same price, for the reasons I wrote above in the article. What you have to sacrifice? Sometimes details and PU, but there are models with good stuff even at this price range. There are just two big counterindications: the first one is the resale value and the second one the overall condition of the guitar.

For the first one you can’t do much, it’s really hard to sell a guitar with an anonymous brand for most of the guitarists, you can explain with the best words how good it is but that damn logo will be your curse. If you are going to sell one of these you’ll probably spend years to find a buyer interested and probably you will have to lower the price a couple of times.

For the second point you must pay attation to details as fret condition, scratches, repairs etc, because it’s easy to buy a fourth hand instrument with a lot of damages caused by the years, and sometimes it can be just an aesthetic problem, in others it can make your new instrument almost unplayable.

Last but not least! You must know where it was built, in what year, the overall condition and all the features. Sometimes catalogs are available, sometimes not, it’s a big risk to buy an instrument without knowing if it’s the exact model the seller is saying is it. You must know by what wood were made and how, what PU it holds etc. This makes finding a good vintage guitar for this amount of money a real journey through websites from all over the world to compare prices, search for catalogs and opinions of owners, but if you are not in a rush eventually you will find the right guitar.

More recent used guitar:

Here we have to distinguish 90s, first 00s and post 2006 guitars. For the first kind we can apply the same rules of the vintage ones, but you must be more careful about the unknown brands because after the 80s most of them started declining and producing cheaper guitars with all the counterindications we know.

On the other hand you can find really awesome pieces by the most known brands as Ibanez, Yamaha, Epiphone etc which still have a good manufacture and production. Maybe it’s better to buy a 90’s Epiphonethan a newer one, also until 2006 they didn’t use tone chambers to make the guitar lighter.

“Post 2006 used guitars” is the category I generally don’t advice to you, just only in few cases. If you have read all the article you know what you have to sacrifice here, sincewe’re talking about almost the same kind of problematics of the new ones. A 450$ used guitar maybe as new was sold for around 600 or 700$, and that assures you a decent quality of wood and features, probably with a pick up upgrade the guitar could become really solid. Even for 700$ you can’t be sure the manifacture is good and the production can be located in Indonesia, Vietnam or Korea and crafted in chain with all the problems you know. The drama is that the only two things you can’tchange on a guitar is the way it was assembled and what types of wood they used. For the first thing you are literally jumping in the dark, for the wood you can be lucky to find a nice piece, anyway a recent used guitar can become a nightmare if you pay a nice amount of money and you receive a guitar with a knot in the wood, so it will sound “dead”.

Used guitars made in recent years probably are in a better condition than the old ones and it’s one of few “upsides” of this category.

In my opinion there are just two case where to buy a recent used guitar for 500$ or less it’s a real deal: when you find a fool or when you find a desperate one.

“The Fool” is someone who doesn’t know what is selling and maybe it’s dropping the price drastically as someone who is selling a Gibson SG for 400$ just because he wants to buy a different model fast.

The other case is easy to recognize because sometimes you can read that the announcement is online for more than a year, which means that they are dropping the price to sell more easily.

In any case pay attetion to the fakes! Nowdays it’s easy to find a fake copy made in Indonesia of Gibson SG or LP and the only way to check the production is the serial number on the back of the head. If you find a Gibson LP custom for 500$ probably it’s made in Indonesia.

The guide is yours, now you have the tools to choose correctly your new axe!

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Guide to buy a guitar for around 500€ / 500$ PART 2/3

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Now we know that we can’t have a guitar with the best features for 500$ or less, let’s focus on the fact that there are just two type of guitar you can searching for: New or Used.

What you have to sacrifice in this section can be: production, hardware (almost 100% of the times) and manufactures. The more you go below the 500$ mark, the higher is the risk to find bad wood and made in China guitars. Expecially for the new pieces is very common to find a guitar made in Asia but as said before it’s not always something bad if you are searching low-budget guitar.

Epiphone or Squier? You must be very lucky to find a well manifactured guitar for these two brand. You must sacrifice details, production and almost every time manufacture. These brand are linked to the bigger ones just because of an economic choice of the mother house to give to normal people a cheaper version of their most exspensive guitar. The really minefield of all this post is the range of price where you can find both “Epi” and Gibson, Squier and Fender. For what I’ve experienced the differences are in the details and PU. So, if you want to spend 100$ to have a “better” bridge, color of body or bridge PU you are free to choice the “big brand” guitar but you have to know that in both cases you don’t have a very good guitar. Online you can read opinions about the “melody maker”, “junior” and “faded” series of Gibson to know what they sacrificed to give us, for a modest price, a guitar labeled Gibson which has almost nothing of what makes Gibson a top brand in guitar production. So what's the main "pro" to buy a cheap guitar with these brands? You can sell it for half the price and so to have virtually paid it the half, when you will sell it.

My advice for Epi and Squier is to find a good series. Almost every two years Gibson and Fender produces a new series with new features that change mostly details, but the big differences are the production and manifacturing because in a rare case you can find an Epi produced in a decent factory in Korea and this means that its overall quality of manufacture is higher than the others. Online you can read a lot of debates about almost every series of Epiphone/Gibson, Squier/Fender to decide what’s the best year of production of that specific model. 

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