Those who tell you to spend whatever you can on monitors?

I think this is a case of the inconsistent build quality. My buddy runs a pretty high volume studio and while I wouldn't say he's a "golden ears" type, he's definitely not someone dealing with noise floor issues. On the other hand he runs a LFAC and records to tape, so maybe he wouldn't notice! So much noise already.

This is where RME becomes the Kings of the Castle. They write drivers for all of their legacy pieces when new OS are released. My buddy has the RME interface he bought in college and can run it on a brand new computer. He's 36. 

By adding an RME MADIface ($1Kish) I was able integrate my 1st generation Antelope Orion into a new MacStudio.  That was a significant savings during my upgrade last summer. 

I think in terms of 5 year IT cycles, your gear still has some resale value, and you never have door stop gear?

I looked very closely at RME last year when I was moving off of Apollo for this exact reason. And it's pretty appealing. But in the end I just couldn't afford the amount of I/O I would need. MOTU 828es + MOTU 24ao was something like $2k. Pair that with my already existing Cranborne 500 and UA 4-710 and I've got 26 inputs and 44 outputs. 

No way to reasonable afford it (for me) on RME. But they've been rock solid forever, they are definitely Kings of reliability.

First because when it comes to speakers “ Flat” is in reality a series of peaks and dips, in real lit it will always be followed by an excepted deviation (+-) l.
Second, it’s about where these peaks and valleys are that matters.
Third, this is a biggie, concepts such as “ bright” brittle” “thin”” etc can have as much to do with distortion characteristics as Frq response, it’s just easy to think it’s all about amplitude when it can be how a diaphragm breaks up or flexes.

Short answer: I can’t.

Long answer: One thing it only took me many years of misguided education to realize: the Fletcher Munson curves are the AVG of the typical human ear response- NOT any actual single ear response. After much contemplation, I decided to do my own experiments on myself and figured I should be able to recreate the curves- IF my monitoring is flat, then it should look the same when I do a sweep? Then I can decide for myself which dB to set monitors.

I realized since humans detect loudness as an avg- NOT peak- I’d have to run a sweep pretty slow. Those less than 1 second “self align” sweeps and impulse responses aren’t going to make any sense to the human ear: that’s peak level= transients only. I wonder if any engineering math wizards really consider that? Luckily I think most amps/speakers follow peak and rms response closely.

Pink noise is another area I became skeptical of: if the tone is random then it’s not lasting long enough to become RMS. Again I felt a slow sweep would make the most sense.

I made a 20-20kHz sweep that lasted 90 seconds or so. I figured that would seem close enough to RMS level. And I used a volume fader to record automation.. Rewind and re-do as much as needed until the automation smoothed out every high and low point.

Results were interesting. It followed the Fletcher Munson loudness Curve but much, much less dramatic. I was shocked how smooth and linear most of the SR was to my ear. In other words TRUST YOUR EARS.. I should have known lol.

Conclusion: I figure the mystery of how studios in the 70s must have done so well with “inferior” speakers.. since they used a mic w/VU meter while sweeping around a constant tone generator. And since a VU meter approximates the ears “avg” of hearing, it probably felt more flat than some of the things that measure better today? And so it opens the whole area of “what is flat?”.