BØLT

This year, I decided to invest into a pair of 3-way monitors I'd be able stick with for the next decade(s) or so. I listened to the **Neumann KH310, Adam S3V, Focal Trio6 Be** and the **Focal Twin6 Be** on several occasions and have worked with a bunch of Barefoot monitors in the past (MM26 / MM27). There was always something magical about Barefoots for me in the way they're able to reproduce dynamic range like a pair of mains while offering the microscopic precision of near fields and offering deep and precise low-end even at low volumes. None of these qualities jumped out at me quite as much with the other monitors I've listened to the way it did with Barefoots, so the Footprint 01s just felt like the natural choice for me. Not only are they superior on paper, they are compact, built like tanks, and they are one of the few options with a sealed cabinet in this echelon of the 3-way monitor realm. Not really a fan of ported speaker designs. Once I set them up and measured them with Sonarworks they immediately brought all of the Barefoot qualities mentioned above into my studio space. Super deep and precise low-end that's not boomy or overwhelming, laser-precision midrange, and smooth yet precise top-end that's non-fatiguing and offers a very wide sweet spot. Plus, the dual-force technology (horizontally opposing woofers) means that there are NO cabinet vibrations whatsoever - NONE. MEME technology (monitor emulations) provides secondary and tertiary reference options without needing a second or third pair of speakers and really lets you hone in on the midrange and make sure that your bass and kick are audible even on tiny speakers. I can't confirm that they sound super close to NS-10s or MixCubes but what I do know is that those modes are super helpful to make sure your midrange and low end translates well or even to just get a different perspective from time to time. However, I found that the flat setting translates super well to begin with and I don't really feel the need to reference anywhere else - thus, I mainly use MEME to check mixes once they're pretty much done. I won't be parting ways with these for a long time.

Got it with maxed out CPU, 32 Gb of RAM and 1 TB SSD and it's flying through pop productions like a champ. 120+ tracks with most of them from un-printed synths and samplers, tons of Little AlterBoys and Melodyne? No problem. 350 track live mixdown? No problem. 4K video editing with hardware-accelerated h.265 encoding (thanks to the T2 chip)? Yup. It seriously rocks.

Pristine converters, basically no self-noise, 2 high-z inputs, zero-latency headphone mixes, MADI to ADAT / AES conversion, and MADI, ADAT, and AES inputs... This is the swiss army knife of A/D converters.