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Alesis M1Active 520
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Alesis M1Active 520

Active Monitor from Alesis belonging to the M1 series

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« Great Sound For Price »

Published on 03/21/11 at 09:35
I was wanting some active monitors for mixing/mastering with for my own production needs, I was using headphones to mix to but friends and other producers told me that I should seriously consider getting some monitors.
I looked around for a while to find some that were in my price range and these were it.
They come as a pair for under £200 which is great I must say for how they sound. I think that with monitors though, the more you spend the better you are going to get. For example, at the studio I have a pair of genlecs that cost a lot of money but they definitely sound a lot better than these I have at home.
I do have a sub woofer hooked up as well since the bass response is good but not good enough to pick up sub bass. I produce a lot of dnb and dubstep at home which makes me need a sub for the low end frequencies, these monitors have good bass but definitely not great for mixing sub bass to.
They have 2 choices of input. TRS or XLR, I am using balanced TRS jacks at the moment with my soundcard which is an m-audio fast track pro.

SOUNDS

I must say that the sound is great, stereo image is spot on and you can put them wherever you want.
What I mean by this is that they have acoustic space options at the back which allow you to put them in a corner of your room without it being too bassy this is great for home studio set ups that do not have a lot of room to properly position everything in. This option is definitely one of the reasons why I bought these monitors.
Everything sounds realistic but compared to high end genlecs these lack a little in sound.
The frequency response is good, I still use a sub woofer though to mix sub bass whilst producing.
They are pretty small monitors so I would not recommend them for pro studio environments, I personally like wider speakers in the main studio as I feel they sound even better.


OVERALL OPINION

The things I like most about them is the sound that you get, I think that for the price I paid for these monitors they are really good value.
I like the size of them but I would go bigger if I could. They colour is a very nice finish I must admit and they also have a blue light that shows that they are on and it flickers red if the speaker is distorting which I think is very handy but they have not done that with me before, I just know this because of the manual.
I have used a lot of monitors before buying these, all the ones I have used though are for recording studios which are really high end monitors that these would not beat.
If I had more money I would definitely buy some different more expensive monitors but for now I will stick with these definitely.