If you are looking specifically at studio monitors it's worth baring in mind a couple of facts.
1. Studio monitors are designed to be placed in a studio environment. The better the quality of monitor, the better the monitoring evironment needs to be to hear the improvement. Let me make an analogy. Let's say you go out and buy yourself a nice Ferrari, it looks way better than a Honda Civic and provided you have some nice curvy empty roads, the performance will make the Honda feel like a toy. However, if all you are going to do is drive the Ferrari in a crowded metropolitan area you are not going to notice much of a performance improvement over the Civic. It will look a whole lot better and will be something you can brag about but you will never experience anything but a fraction of the performance improvement of your lovely new Ferrari.
2. Most commercial music, once recorded and mixed in the studio is then passed on to a mastering engineer. The mastering engineer alters some of the sonic characteristics of the music so that it will sound good on a range of consumer equipment rather than sounding good just in the studio (and on the studio monitors) in which it was mixed. So this implies, for the home user, that studio monitors are not going to give you quite what you might be expecting.
G
1. Studio monitors are designed to be placed in a studio environment. The better the quality of monitor, the better the monitoring evironment needs to be to hear the improvement. Let me make an analogy. Let's say you go out and buy yourself a nice Ferrari, it looks way better than a Honda Civic and provided you have some nice curvy empty roads, the performance will make the Honda feel like a toy. However, if all you are going to do is drive the Ferrari in a crowded metropolitan area you are not going to notice much of a performance improvement over the Civic. It will look a whole lot better and will be something you can brag about but you will never experience anything but a fraction of the performance improvement of your lovely new Ferrari.
2. Most commercial music, once recorded and mixed in the studio is then passed on to a mastering engineer. The mastering engineer alters some of the sonic characteristics of the music so that it will sound good on a range of consumer equipment rather than sounding good just in the studio (and on the studio monitors) in which it was mixed. So this implies, for the home user, that studio monitors are not going to give you quite what you might be expecting.
G
