#VINTAGE AURATONE 5C PORTABLE#
#VINTAGE AURATONE 5C SERIES#

I once mixed a ten-part TV series entirely on a pair of Auratones when I was assignd to an editing suite with questionable monitors. I know that whenever I was thrown into a questionable or unfamiliar monitoring environment I made sure I was armed with a set of Auratones. After a long time monitoring on the big boys and fatiguing your ears, the Auratones offered an alternative that allowed you drop the volume and still know what was going on. The unglamorous side of recording is that sessions can go on for hours, sometime twelve to sixteen hours. Their smooth midrange nature just forced the mixer to prioritize his midrange information and keep it under control.Ī classic late-1980s Auratone 5c Super CubeĪnother little-discussed characteristic of these monitors was that due to their flat response and gentle roll-offs they were extremely easy on the ears.

#VINTAGE AURATONE 5C PORTABLE#

As a result, the most significant characteristic of these monitors was that they practically demanded that the team create an excellent, portable mix simply by virtue of their sound.

The most important thing for a studio monitor to do is influence the production team to make great recordings and mixes. Many people think the most important thing for a studio monitor to do is to sound great, but that isn't really true. At that distance they exhibit a gentle roll-off on both high and low-end response. But these speakers were designed to be console-top, near-field units. If you could strap a headband on a pair and wear them like headphones you'd have very nice sounding headphones indeed. We actually did that measurement at my facility for fun and verified that claim. If you set a measurement mic up right at the speaker cone and swept the speaker with tones you would get amazingly flat response from 60hz-18khz. These little speakers had the unique advantage that they sported a single full-range driver, ensuring phase accuracy. Console manufacturers were offering 'turrets' to hold the Auratones on the top edge of their consoles. To get a reliable mix on the fly all you needed was a pair of Auratones and a Crown DC-75 amp.īy 1980, the 5C Supercube was taking the field by storm. Their popularity grew to the point that by 1975, wherever you went in the recording world, you would likely find a pair of Auratones on top of the console at any respectable studio. The speaker was designed to be a small reference that an engineer could take anywhere that would always sound the same. It was a six-and-a-half inch, cube-form mixing reference monitor featuring a specially-designed, wide-range, five-inch driver. Dressed in faux walnut veneer, the tiny Auratone Model 5 Cube was born in 1960. In 1958 an intrepid fellow named Jack Wilson founded a little company in Chula Vista, CA, for the purpose of creating recording monitors. Depending on your age and years of experience in recording, you may or may not recall the great little reference monitors called Auratones. Gather around kiddies and you will hear a tale of a little monitor that could: What we have in the pic above is a relatively rare set of Auratone 5RC Super Road Cubes. 'Don't know, but it do look like a stout little package, don't it?' Balanced XLR and 1/4' TRS Inputs, as well as unbalanced RCA connections are provided for maximum versatility, and the enclosure is magnetically shielded so it won’t disrupt your computer video monitors.Studio Survivors Studio Survivors, March 2016 The 6.5' cube contains its own dedicated 30-Watt Class-D power amp and a specially designed 5-1/4' full-range speaker for crystal-clear audio reproduction. The Auratone C5A full-range reference studio monitor lets you hear what your mixes will sound like on real-world systems such as car stereos, computers, televisions, and other bass-challenged systems.

Vintage auratone 5c