Pioneer S-DJ05 or S-DJ50x? … or may be Rokit 5?

An important question to ask yourself…

Do you want something for producing, for general listening at home, or for playing out?
These tasks will generally require a different type of speaker, and compromises will be made if it checks off two or more of these categories.

Haven’t heard the Pioneers personally, so can’t comment, but the KRKs are seriously bass heavy (probably why so many DJs love them). This makes them better for listening to playback than for producing as you would have a hard time getting accurate (flat) sound out of them.

That said, studio monitors are an immensely personal choice, because every speaker has a unique sound, and every room has unique acoustics. Always good to try and find somewhere to listen to them, and then to buy them from somewhere that will let you exchange should you get them home and not like how they sound in your space. I fully expected to buy KRKs when I went shopping, but ended up going in a totally different direction.

I have used a pair of Rokit 5’s a few times (I mixed – as in multi-track audio mixing – on them in a studio for a while last year. They aren’t bass heavy at all – In fact I found that I kept turning the bass up on certain instruments and then had to compensate when I listened to my mix through different systems..

They sound good – But you really don’t need monitors that accurate for DJ practice, but you do need them if you are producing.

Also have a look at the Yamaha HS7 – £144 a side, apparently flatter freq. response than the KRK’s (which have a noticeable dip in the mid range)…

bob6397

The USB to analogue conversion will be happening regardless, so no need to worry much about that as long as you are using a solid sound card (someone correct me if I’m wrong, but the NI-A2 should be just fine).

With regards to the cables, yes – in theory the more adaptors/junctions/conversions you have to put into a line, there can be sound degradation, however it isn’t likely to be anything noticeable on a very short run and on the grade of speakers we’re talking about here – so don’t worry about it either.

I happen to disagree with the bass-heaviness of the KRKs. I would actually suggest NOT getting 5″ KRKs if you want them for either DJ production work or DJ practice, but go for the 6″.

I used the KRKs for some sound engineering work. They work well once you have your ears “dialed-in” to them.

If you don’t have to engineer raw recorded material and/or do heavy EQ work at the mastering stage, KRKs will do as will many other monitor speakers. The KRKs just happen to have a very nice price/performance ratio going. Most comparable monitors will run 10-20% higher in price.

Clearly the Pioneers are fine also.

Make no mistake though, in monitoring as in PA, you get what you pay for. The next step up is at least 2-4 times as expensive. Anything near pro level will run you around 1.000 bucks a speaker or (lots) more. Again this is only relevant for professional recording and mastering studios.

At the distances you are talking about RCA (cinch) should work fine. Just get a decent cable, not the chinese crap that comes in the box with your home avr system. And don’t bother with gold-plated or monster cable either. Waste of money.

In general it IS true that you can hear difference in some cable quality when you A/B compare cables in a full pro environment with the aforementioned VERY expensive monitors and a high end digital or analogue mixer. This is primarily true for XLR cables with microphones. Why? Because the signal level from a (dynamic) microphone is much lower than that of a line level (CD, controller, etx.) signal. Meaning the sound/noise ration and the noise floor play a lot bigger part in the equation.

With the high line levels the s/r is usually so big that you can’t hear a difference. With a single source low level signal like a vocal on a mic this can make a difference.

So, as a DJ running line level into monitor speakers, don’t worry about it.