There are room calibration systems that perform digital monitoring but Trinnov have taken it to another level. This little French company of some 60 employees have cut their teeth in home audio but their Pro-Audio solutions are really high-end products.
The rack mounted unit together with their proprietary software will set you back over €8,000 and you will also need their 3D mic to do the job properly and that's over €750 as well. The 3D mic (which is a very artistic looking device) is needed to listen to the room and help calibrate the system and whilst some people borrow or rent one to set up, we think it is best to buy one so you can check your system performance regularly.
The D-Mon is well specified with a ton of ins and outs meaning you can connect up to 18 monitors including sub-woofers and then mix and match them in your set up. So its a pretty flexible monitoring device in its own right.
Once your room and setup are calibrated, a really great feature of the D-Mon is that it can sit within your EUCON setup for ProTools. Essentially, you control ProTools but D-Mon is making the changes with the calibrated room set up in mind. It's pretty clever, however, we have sometimes found that there is a lot of control and settings in the D-Mon that mean we need to constantly check our sound in and out of the Trinnov world. But for some, and particularly permanently set up studios without much day to day change its a great, reliable solution.
The Trinnov Optimiser Technology is used in nearly 2,000 studios around the world and it is fast becoming recognised as the ultimate pro solution for studio monitoring control, calibration and performance.
The product is really well thought out and includes number of considerations and features which are really nice to have in this sort of high-end monitoring solution. For example, its 'Matrix Bass Management' puts a real focus on the Bass element of a studio setup where subwoofers are included. Of course, subwoofers are nice to have if you want to playback your EDM track and really feel the bass you have spent hours perfecting, but some, still argue that a subwoofer shouldn't enter the music studio since they generally, well, enhance the bass and in a studio you don't want speakers to colour anything. So on that basis, we fell that the best feature for a music studio from the D-Mon is the fact that you can calibrate a monitor setup, with subwoofers, but be confident that the frequencies across all of your monitors including the subwoofers are being properly mapped out.
Other features include Audio Over IP, Analog and Digital ins/outs, Internal Mixer, Dolby Atmosphere capable, integration with Midi and its EUCON protocol.
So in a nutshell, for us, the D-Mon fits into a more elaborate monitor setup kind of studio. It doesn't work for us for smaller setups where we suggest a more budget room calibration system which work on the same principle as D-Mon but won't necessarily knock the ball out of the park when it comes to incorporating subwoofers.
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