Thanks, good to hear…
As a general rule, studio monitors are designed to be “revealing” and to colour the sound as little as possible.
Although you might think this is should be the case for all hifi speakers, it’s not actually necessarily true. Hifi speakers are often designed to sound “musical”. Often this means they do colour the sound in ways which make the music sound nice.
It’s similar to people who prefer valve hifi amps or vinyl records: these actually distort the sound compared with equivalent solid-state/digital systems, which will provide far more accurate sound reproduction (and for a much lower cost), but a lot of people like the nature of that valve/vinyl distortion and how it sounds.
Of course there’s other, tactile, reasons why people like vinyl or the smell of hot valves. And, frankly, some people just like to collect old things and to have expensive gear.
So it is possible that you may not enjoy the sound of your monitors for music listening. They may sound different enough from your hifi speakers to annoy you. You may find, for instance, that the treble sounds too harsh or prominent compared to hifi speakers which tend to favour bass/midrange to sound “warm”.
However, I personally think that’s fairly unlikely. I honestly think the difference between hifi speakers and studio monitors is overstated. And you always have EQ controls to adjust things if you need to.
Cheers,
Keith
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FWIW, I have listened to digital music on my monitors and it sounds fine. But I don’t think my ears are as finely tuned as some peoples. Distinctions need to be quite coarse for me to hear them. Subtle changes that a sound engineer hears I am quite sure I’d not tell the difference.
Now maybe if I was in a sound-proofed, treated room with perfect acoustics and had a playback setup that somebody could switch a source seamlessly back and forth between studio monitors and hifi speakers of similar quality I might hear a difference sufficiently obvious to make a clear preference.
But I listen at home, in an imperfect environment, and the quality is sufficient that it doesn’t sound bad. So I expect you’d quickly become used to the sound and be satisfied. And as Keith said, EQ could also be added.
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Gentlemen, you have helped me a lot, since I place the stuff in the living room that is quite open, (so not an ideal recording situation, … but the coziest it is )…
Then I’m going now to my German friends to order some guitar stuff again…I saw that you also have to order separate cables with it, … so pay attention to everyone who reads this later.
Many thanks guys…i’m afraid i’ll get back to you later,…this is going to be a huge adventure,…computer/software and i haven’t been friends until now, 
…nicely said.
And @Richard_close2u ,yesterday later in the day accidentally discovered what I was doing wrong with quotes…but thanks for correcting. 
Greeting, and be careful if you go outside today … especially in this crazy Netherlands with many who want to set off fireworks themselves…all the best to you lovely people,
and we wish you a lot of music playing for the new year, 
Rogier
Edit: I just discovered that the piano that we haven’t had for very long (casio cdp-s100) can be connected to the interface 
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You’re welcome. Highlight the text you want to quote and click q on the keyboard is a simple method. 
Finally it dawned on me…read the manual of the interface on the internet,.there was a picture that cleared everything up…so I’ve removed a picture and some text here to avoid confusion.
Have a peaceful night, greetings
Rogier
I’ve thought one and off about getting monitors but haven’t got around to it. I now have a couple of friends wanting to come over to see how I’m getting on with the Scarlett 2i2 and I’m thinking it’s time to go ahead and get some. It’s the only way the 3 of is are going to be able to hear the output well enough to talk about what can be done in the DAW isn’t it? Correct me if I’m wrong.
I’ve looked up the entry level monitors mentioned in this thread and compared the Adam @Majik TV5 bundle for £330 and the Yamaha @DavidP @J.W.C HS5 bundle for £302, both from Andertons. At this stage, not knowing anything about them the specs mean nothing to me. Any thoughts on my choices? Looking to develop my home studio a little bit. Not looking for high quality. My ability and aural discernment is not good enough for that. I’ve tagged the members who originally mentioned the products I’ve researched.
Edit: Found this YT review by a schoolboy! Sounds like he could be a compatriot @DavidP. If I judge by this and bearing in mind what @Majik said about clean, uncoloured sound I’d choose the Yamaha. For listening for musical enjoyment I’d go for the Adam. @roger_holland I have a very small room to work in that shares a couple of other functions. Entry level, small monitors fit better.
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Hi John,
Actually I don’t know anything about monitors, I asked some questions here and through reviews I chose the yahama hs8, they came out as the best, … but first I bought the sacarlett4i4 and while downloading the software and updates I thought I needed my computer died,…I’m still tapping on a loaner laptop and have to buy my own soon(I don’t like looking for something like this)… only then do I order the yamaha monitors (My wife also made me wait for the new curtains that were hung this month, … those boxes are quite large, and they will be placed where they hang open)…the forum members you quote will help you with the right choice for you… good luck with it 
Greetings
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Hi John your monitors are quite from the upper range cost wise but some time ago I asked about recommendations check it out. I eventually went with Mackie and they are great to my needs.
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Hi @adi_mrok I looked at the thread. It seems to me that the monitors linked there are passive, whereas the Yamaha pair are active monitors. I’m wondering now how much of a difference that will make. I shall try to find out more how they sound.
For an audio interface, you need active monitors really.
If you get passive monitors you will need a separate amplifier, and that’s a whole new can of worms.
So I suggest active monitors.
Active monitors also tend to be better than passive monitors anyway, as the onboard amplifiers are tailored to give a more optimal result with the speakers and cabinet. They also often have multiple amps in each unit, driving the tweeters separately from the main speakers. Some higher-end active monitors have 3 separate on board amps, for bass, midrange, and tweeter speakers.
The Behringer and IK Multimedia units in that thread are definitely active. But they are on the smaller and lower-end. If you can afford the money and space for something better, I would recommend it. Either the Yamaha or the Adam Audio ones should be a good purchase.
Cheers,
Keith as
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John, I can’t add more to what I’ve shared before. Mine work well and the purchase was based on size/output power and availability.
There are many other reputed brands tgat would offer something similar such as Mackie as Adrian mentioned and Presonus based on recollection of reviews.
And I expect a lot will be at a relatively similar pricepoint.
A best of Googling will throw up a bunch of budget monitor review and comparison articles. I’d suggest checking that out and then testing your conclusions here.
Afternoon producers 
. Quick question. Does anyone have any experience with Ubuntu Studio tools? - JACK, Ardour, Carla, Audacity etc.? How do they stand in comparison with Logic Pro or any other DAWs? cheers. Pez0rg
I have experience of most of those.
I’ve never directly used Ubuntu Studio, but I have used a couple of Ubuntu derivatives (including KDE Neon which I currently use) and these are, effectively, the same thing once configured appropriately.
In general, what you get with these tools is a relatively mature, well rounded capability that competes well against other DAW set ups and, in some ways, is more flexible and powerful.
There’s some gotchas:
Firstly, audio device support in Linux can be hit and miss because most vendors don’t directly support Linux. There is, however, fairly decent support because a) a lot of audio interfaces comply with standards that are supported on Linux, and don’t actually need a driver, and b) for common devices, there’s a community out there developing and testing drivers.
I, myself, was heavily involved in testing for a range of Roland/Boss devices which made it’s way into the kernel a few years ago, including the Boss Katana.
Secondly, some of the additional power can come with some complexity. Increasingly that’s becoming easier to manage or to avoid.
Finally, whilst there’s a wide range of open-source plug-ins and instruments, a reasonable selection of commercial ones, and it’s possible to get some Windows plugins working using Wine, most well-known plugin vendors don’t create versions for Linux yet. So if you see someone promoting a plugin somewhere, the chances are you won’t be able to use it, and will need to seek an alternative.
A couple of specific application notes:
Ardour
The version of Ardour that comes with Ubuntu (and most other distros) is not the official version and has some issues. You should use the official version that can be obtained from ardour.org instead. You will need to pay for this, but you can chose to pay as little as $1, but if you can please pay more as it supports development.
With the more recent versions of Ardour, you should not need to use Jack unless you have a special use case, avoiding a fair bit of complexity.
Audacity
This is, basically, the same version of the popular audio editor on other platforms and it works just as well. However, it is NOT a proper DAW and, personally, I recommend against using it if you want to do anything more than simple single-track recording.
Frankly, it can be clunky and awkward to use, and it’s not really designed to support a multi-track recording workflow.
Cheers,
Keith
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Keith, first of all, thank you for your quick reply and a lengthy one indeed. Didnt expect any reply at all actually, since most folks are either Mac or Windows users.
It is nice to know that there are some other players linux admins 
out there and your experience in testing for Roland/Boss must have been amazing.
I have installed all the mentioned soft now but didnt have much time since I posted my question to test any of them but from what Ive seen so far, my PC and the sound-card seems to be responding quite well.
Will buy Ardour over the weekend and will take it for a spin.
Thanks again.
Perzo.
You are welcome and, if you have any questions, feel free to ask. I’m not the only Linux user in this community. Ardour also has a pretty good community that you may want to explore.
To be clear, I wasn’t working with Roland/Boss. I was working with the Kernel Devs,. specifically the ALSA lead developer.
I have been on the alsa-devel mailing list for years and had submitted simple patches for some of the Roland/Boss kit I had.
But for a number of years there were issues with some of the newer devices that were preventing them from working with Linux, and a few of us on the mailing list were trying to address that. It seemed to be a fundamental issue with how these products were using implicit feedback.
We eventually got the attention of the lead dev, Takeshi Iwai, who committed to try to get some of these working, As I had access to several different types of unit (including a Katana, JS8, GT-1 and GT-001) I did a lot of the testing, with Takeshi sending me patches over several weeks to try. In the end it was quite a complex issue to solve (with no help from Boss) and required a fairly large number of patches.
https://lore.kernel.org/alsa-devel/20201123085347.19667-1-tiwai@suse.de/
Eventually, he got it working and it’s now part of the standard Linux kernel from about 5.12, I think.
Cheers,
Keith
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Yes, I recently switched over from PulseAudio to PipeWire, a massive advantage of this (from my perspective) is that you can then see all audio sinks and sources in Jack to link things up.
I pretty much followed Unfa’s video on setting PW up: I've replaced JACK and PulseAudio with PipeWire and this is what happened - YouTube
IMO it’s well worth a look at PW if you want to use Ubuntu Studio. I was (really) pleasantly surprised by how easy it made everything.
(The only thing that can go a little bit wonky now and then is setting sample rate in Ardour on the fly, so watch out for that!)
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I think Ubuntu 22.04 has Pipewire by default now.
Cheers,
Keith
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Installed, and not enabled (for some reason), in Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS (from a clean install due to the switch over to Plasma, though that’s a story for another day!).
Installed and enabled though from 22.10. There’s great set of instructions here for anyone on 22.04 LTS: GitHub - mikeroyal/PipeWire-Guide: PipeWire Guide. Learn about how PipeWire gives your Linux system a Professional Audio/Video Processing workflow.
Even after doing all that, I needed to go to /etc/security/limits.conf and add: @audio - nice -20 To the end of the file. Reboot and use systemctl --user status pipewire pipewire-session-manager to check status
PulseAudio still wasn’t being masked by pipewire automatically, so I also then did:
systemctl --user mask pulseaudio.service
systemctl --user mask pulseaudio.socket
[I think some libraries were missing and had to be added before everything ran ‘comfortably’ as well]
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I’m using KDE Neon, which is based on Ubuntu 22.04:
$ lsb_release -a
LSB Version: core-11.1.0ubuntu4-noarch:security-11.1.0ubuntu4-noarch
Distributor ID: Neon
Description: KDE neon 5.27
Release: 22.04
Codename: jammy
I actually reinstalled this onto my laptop last weekend. The instructions I used are here:
Enable PipeWire on Ubuntu 22.04
Cheers,
Keith
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