Hello all. Just spent the evening checking out the KRK V4 monitors in comparison to my Mackie HR824's and collected some thoughts on them. The HR824's are very good top to bottom speakers with little hype, and I've been looking for an alternative reference to give me a more "real world" picture of what's happening.

The V4's tell me more about low end translation at low volumes compared to the Mackies. Particularly kick drums stand out as a problem if there is some excessive woofiness going on. You get that somewhat choked 4" speaker sound that just can't quite get down there like the HR824's can, but you don't have to crank them to hear it. Using the V4's I also quickly found a problem on a vocal in a quick mix I had done recently, it had too much low end in it and had a bit of a woof / boxiness to it. The Mackies handle low end so easily that again it sort of flew by me because it doesn't really cause problems on HR824's and there's so much room on the low end of them.

The V4's do not reach as high as the Mackies either, they aren't as open / crisp. Again the V4's are reaching for something more like a car speaker or a TV in comparison. I'm not saying they sound bad, but in regards to translation they even have a bit of that NS10 boxiness to them. Not real "airy" speakers, but the Mackies deliver a lot on top so they compliment each other well. Vocals are less sibilant as well on the V4's.

The song I was looping had an extremely close mic'd snare with a wonderful 1kHz-ish ring to it. The V4's brought this out more in comparison to the HR824's, along with the vocal having a different and slightly more forward presence.

There is a 3 way switch on back enabling:

1) Clip Indicator ON
2) OFF
3) Limiter ON

and I would suggest turning the switch anywhere but Limiter ON.

The limiter just isn't a good idea in reference use, and I found it to slightly distort on louder / lengthy present sources like vocals. It was pretty transparent on quick transients, but again in the real world you're either going to clip or not clip and I'd rather stick with real world.

You can push the V4's pretty loud, but don't go looking for Mackie loudness. Those HR824's CRANK, and have a serious amount of headroom in my experience. I liked the V4's at medium to softer monitoring levels but you can push them if you like. If you push monitors a lot I suggest turning off the Clip Indicator, every transient kick / snare hit will blip it on but I'm not hearing distortion. I think it's a bit of an overly sensitive indicator.

The on/off/auto selection for power is nice, I leave my Mackies on AUTO too. The V4's turn off after 20 minutes.

We will be doing a full shootout of KRK monitors at a local studio here in Columbia SC soon. This was in my own studio as they are a likely purchase for me. We are now a full line KRK dealer but they won't be on the site until the site is updated (coming soon).

War