Architect said:
You might be better off getting a good pair of headphones and calling it a day lol. The size of your room will make a difference on the type of sound that you get from your monitors. To be honest with you it's just not worth it to try and get some cheap monitors, your better off using whatever house speakers you have now, if you have any and use that as your monitoring system for right now.
A lot of people don't realize your monitoring is just about the second most important piece of equipment next to the instruments your recording, more important than converters, compressors, preamps, etc all that shit won't mean didly unless you can HEAR IT PROPERLY. Of course you can learn how to use any monitoring system with time but I wouldn't waste money, save up and get some half way decent monitors or better. If you have house speakers I would use that for the time being just learn how to use them, learn what frequencies they exaggerate or don't boost enough of, it won't be perfect but at least save up for the better monitoring.
Yeah, architect got other points important here. You got to hear wut your doing. But bass response is shit on headphones. Yeah you hear it, but you are not sensing it. You got to hear it from close field monitors to hear if there is gaps or return (bass wave collapsing).
A lot of time bass squash your mix in headphones. Headroom can sometime sound smaller than is for real, resulting in a not full mix.
Some will say engineers use headphones, cuz they see that in TV and such, but they, like us, use em to avoid feedback, and to hear any error made by musicians,singer when recording. But when mixing they'll use monitors.
Call any studio, ask to the engineer if he mix with headphones. I agree with the fact that it could be better for him to save his cash to buy more decent monitoring system (Mackie 624, Genelec 1029 or Dynaudio BM5,etc..)
It's 200% better to mix on small monitors than on home stereo, except if you have high end stuff (Mission, Acoustic Research, Yamaha's Natural Series, Nikko,Etc...).
Edirol monitors are made for the only purpose of mixing, home system colors the sound so much. You can learn how your home system sound but you got to have an experienced ear to hear the frequency gaps and peaks and mix as you would when you know your monitors.
Go for it Rythmical and get em. You could buy used monitors, but you doesnt know wut they were used for, they could have problems in stereo imaging and field, they could be dephased and you will not notice it.
Used got no guarantee and lot of the time changing a piece in a speaker will cost half the price of it new.
But if you can get a good deal at a store you know well, you could get better monitors for the same price your Edirols new.