Product Review: Auralex Mopads (Stuido Monitors)

Well Worth the Money

So you've got your first set of studio monitors, and you're setting them up on your nice wood desk. It's a vast improvement from mixing on your stereo or the headphones you got for tracking vocals, and you're sure that your mixes will improve. Sure enough - your monitors have a lot more detail, and you painstakingly measure the distance between your head and between the monitors to make sure you've got a perfect equilateral triangle with tweeters pointed at your ears.

You jump into some old mixes and get to work polishing them up. But you've got a problem - your monitors are interacting with your wooden desk and muddying up your low-mids. For proof, just place your hand on the desk while playing a bass-heavy song. Feel those vibrations? They are resonating in your ears and resonating in your monitors too.

I'd mixed for some time with my Behringer Truths just sitting on my knockdown wood desk and never thought twice about it. But after seeing a thread on a popular audio software site about Auralex Mopads, I decided to try them out. The Mopads are $40 for a pair (actually four angled stands and four angled shims, two per monitor) and made out of stiff foam. I hefted my Truths onto the pads and lined them up with the side edges of the monitors.

As soon as I started playing some of my mixes and commercial CDs, I could tell there was a difference - the lows were more clearly defined and less hyped. But it had been a couple days since I mixed last, so I decided to perform a less arbitrary test.

I took one of the Behringers off the Mopads and set it back on the desk like it was before and opened up a file in Sonar that contains WAV rips of some of my favorite songs from Collective Soul, Dave Matthews Band, Norah Jones, the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack and Audioslave. I set the master output to mono so each monitor would get the same signal and played each song one at a time, switching back and forth between the two monitors with the pan control on my mixer. Here are the results: