United Kingdom (August 5, 2021)—British engineer and producer Dave Eringa has installed new monitors at his Electric Daveyland studio, replacing a pair of speakers he had been using for the past two decades.
Eringa, whose clients include The Manic Street Preachers, Kylie Minogue and Ocean Colour Scene, recalls, “I was doing an album with Roger Daltrey in Metropolis Studios, with mixes done by Michael Brauer, and they had just got new Genelecs in. When we got the mix ready and played it on them and turned it up, I said, ‘Oh my goodness, these sound amazing!’ and that’s what started my ‘I’m going to need to do this’ kind of thinking!
Having previously used the same studio monitors in his own studio rrfor so long, the transition to a pair of Genelec 8351B three-way coaxial Smart Active Monitors setup was something of a challenge. “It was a learning curve, for sure,” Eringa says. “Having worked on one set of speakers continuously for 20 years, I definitely underestimated how easy it would be to change. But I was in the middle of mixing an album at the time, and once I’d got my head around them a week or so later, I started mixing 50% faster!
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“It was amazing — a real game-changer for me. I was definitely committed anyway, but it’s like a snooker player changing his cue — it doesn’t happen overnight,” he continues. “But then when it clicked, I ended up taking mixes into the house, into the car, and things were just sounding the same – and you can’t put a price on that. They’re great, I really love them.”
Eringa’s friend, Andy Bensley from Genelec, visited Electric Daveyland to set the new monitors up with the GLM calibration software. “Andy seems to think that in this room, these speakers without a sub are flat down to 30 Hz, which is pretty wide, and I haven’t got enough good things to say about them,” Eringa says. “I haven’t moved anything by a millimeter. I first had to move a few things around the room that were creating reflections and such, so I’ve just left everything else as it is, because it sounded so good in the first place.”
