The deliberately terrible speaker
Every serious mastering room needs a bad speaker, and the Tantrum Audio Angry Boxes are the best bad speaker made. Small, mono-capable, midrange-only, and utterly unforgiving of anything that hides in the extremes.
What they reveal
Balance. On the PMC IB2 SE mains a vocal can sit perfectly while being 2 dB too quiet for a phone speaker, a laptop or a kitchen radio. The Angry Boxes expose that instantly. If the vocal, the snare and the bassline all read clearly through them, the master will survive the real world.
Mono checking
They are also our primary mono reference. Width tricks that sound spectacular in stereo frequently collapse in mono — club systems, phone speakers and radio all do this to your record. We check every master this way before delivery.
Hardware info
The cheapest speakers we own and one of the highest-value tools in the room. Reference monitoring tells you what the record is; the Angry Boxes tell you what the listener will get.
Hear it on your record
Book a master
This chain is available on every stereo and stem master we deliver from Manchester.