In my opinion there's one development in speaker system design that has largely been ignored by studio monitor companies:

Matching speaker directivity to a given space.

It's a little weird.

Designers of big venue sound systems have been developing and refining this technique for about 30 years now.

If you've ever looked at what they do you'll be excused to think us studio people are stuck in the stone age with our monitors.

It's THE main technique they use to NOT have to do any acoustics and still squeeze the best sound out of a particular space.

So why then haven't we seen this broadly adopted in the studio speaker industry?

My guess: it's simply been too expensive both to develop and sell.

It's also a very different use case so there's definitely a question to be raised about its applicability.

So then how do some of the (few) recent developments in controlled directivity studio monitors fare when it comes to reducing the need for acoustic treatment?

That's what I want to discuss in this week's video.