Help with monitors!

Well looking at both I prefer the KRK. Not that the Pioneer are bad, but to me they color the sound a bit more and a monitor should be as flat as it gets, so you actually hear what you are doing. Also for the price point the KRKs build quality is outstanding.

If the purpose is practice, with the occassional party thrown in (and if you are any good at those parties, you’ll be asked to play more), then I’d go with (for example 10″) active PA speakers. When you practice you get the sound you will hear at the parties you play. There is, imho, no reason to have monitor speakers for practicing.

Unless you are planning on some serious production work, I wouldn’t be spending money on two sets of speakers. Actually when I practice I choose to not use my KRKs, but I set up my booth monitor (which is just an active PA speaker) and play with that. Like Terry said, better to get one speaker to practice with, use at parties and (when you start doing larger gigs) that you can use as booth monitor.

Greetinx.

The RCA-RCA cable will be stereo (and possible not long enough, standard size being 1.8m or less).

Since the SX has balanced master outputs on XLRs and your KRK’s have XLR inputs and I am guessing the Skytek’s (ahum) have XLR inputs as well, I’d invest in two decent and long enough XLR-XLR cables that you can then also use when doing a party with the Skytecs. When calculating the length you need, keep in mind that you need the length going from a controller on a table/booth to the floor, then the distance over the floor to where the speakers will be and then the length of the cable going up the speakerstand to the speakers.

Since you can easily plug one XLR cable onto the next (although best practice is less connectors is better), you could opt for getting 4 cables. Say 2x 3m to hook up controller to KRK’s (which by design need to be real close to you anyway) and then 2x 5 or 10m to extend your length to 8 or 13m each for hooking up Skyteks at a party.

Hope that helps.

Greetinx.

You sure? The Skytec’s don’t have balanced inputs (they might be 6.3 Jacks, not XLR though)?

Because quite frankly I would never hook up my PA speakers using RCA cables. RCA is too sensitive to signal degradation and to picking up unwanted sounds (like nice little 50/60Hz buzz) when ran more than 2-3 meters. Also, you’d need mono RCA cables of a very decent quality (standard RCA cables are way to easy to damage). And with PA’s, 5m really is the shortest length you’ll get away with and only if you have the speakers next to your booth and don’t want your cables hanging in the air like a clothes line 😀 .

I know of Skytek speakers that have stereo RCA inputs, but this is usually part of some built-in “mixer” bit, that lets you hook up an iPod or some other stereo line source. Usually they will have XLR/Jack balanced mono input as well.

Greetinx.

Nope, you need male-male RCA. Female-male are extension cables.