How do they differ from regular floor speakers? Do they provide a better listening experience for music? Movies?
They are your White Van speakers. If you've never heard that term, it's when some guy in a parking lot with a van tells you he's got some expensive speakers and makes up some story as to why he'll sell them to you cheap. They typically look nice, but that's about it.
No, a worse listening experience. They are designed not to sound good but to sound nuetral, so you can mix music in the recording process without the coloration of speakers designed to sound good.
You need proper near-field (sometimes called closefield) studio monitors to do serious mixing. Before I got good monitor speakers, it took me a long time to figure out how to set EQ for the mixes so that things would sound good on random cassette playersand it was tons harder when I attempted to mix with headphones, even good ones. The purpose of good mixing monitors is not for them to sound good or to make your music sound good. It's so you can hear what your music really sounds like, so you can make it sound good! It's not that they're supposed to sound bad, it's that they're not supposed to sound good. They're not supposed to sound bad either. They're just there to reproduce accurately how the music sounds, especially at close range (because you normally sit a lot closer to studio monitors than listening-type speakers). Most high-end speaker systems are set up for theoretical flat response in anechoic chambers and other details that impress the hi-fi buffs. And in the real world, most people who are listening (rather than mixing) diddle with their EQ settings to make the music sound the way they want to hear it. And they rarely sit a meter or so away from both speakers at once as we generally do when mixing. Near-field monitors are made to reproduce music in your studio in such a way so that when you hear it sounding good, it will sound good on boom boxes, stereo systems, and truck radios too. -- Dragon Dragon said it bestthe same page features advice on how to pick a good pair of studio monitors to take home with you. Physically, there are minor differences in the power and signal cables - they have extra shielding in order to avoid EMI that would dirty' up the sound with artifactsAlso, in the design of the actual speakers, sometimes modifications are made to allow very supple movement of the cone, and thus, a very accurate, realistic rendition of the original signal. The key word here is realistic.
