We don’t often review studio monitors, but with more people working from home, more people are recording, mixing, and editing all manner of media from home as well. At $169 each (or $338 for a pair), the Pioneer DJ VM-50 speakers are relatively budget-friendly studio monitors. There’s no Bluetooth or wireless streaming here, no Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, and no headphone jack. These are powered studio monitors, plain and simple, and they’re ideal for near-field monitoring in a medium-sized room. There are some quirks in the design that might scare away purists seeking an unadulterated signal free of DSP (digital signal processing), but if you’re looking for pair of studio monitors or computer speakers that provide a relatively accurate audio representation, you’re in the right place.
DSP vs. EQ
Available in black or white models, each VM-50 measures 11.9 by 7.8 by 10.4 inches (HWD) and weighs 12.2 pounds. The aluminum front face has no protective grille, which is all the better for showing off the angular edges of the MDF enclosure for the 5.25-inch aramid fiber woofer and the 1-inch soft dome tweeter. To the left, the Pioneer DJ logo is emblazoned between the two drivers, and to the right, an LED strip—horizontal, and also with sharp angled edges—glows white when on and red when in standby mode.
The drivers are bi-amplified, each receiving 30 watts of class-D amplification with DSP. They deliver a frequency range of 40Hz to 36kHz.
Below the ported bass-reflex duct, the back panel houses input connections for XLR, quarter-inch balanced TRS, and (unbalanced) RCA. There’s a volume knob, as well as an auto standby on/off switch, and a master power on/off switch. Near the power switch, there’s a connection for the included power cable. The volume knobs have detents and markers so you can match each speaker precisely, though the detents are closely spaced and a little slippery, so in testing it took multiple tries to be certain we had each speaker matched at the same level.
To the right of these inputs and switches, there are the aforementioned DSP knobs. Perhaps the nomenclature here will turn some purists off—if they were labeled EQ knobs, things might seem more in sync with studio lingo (and typical studio philosophy of transparency while recording and mixing). These knobs employ digital filters to achieve their sounds, so technically a term like DSP isn’t incorrect, but it often implies some degree of active processing like dynamic compression or limiting reacting to peaks in the audio, which wouldn’t be something you’d typically want in a studio monitor.
Pioneer DJ reps confirm that, technically, there is some dynamic limiting in the signal chain, but only as a protective measure—an overload limiter on the input stage—so you’d only engage it at extremely high volume levels. There is no dynamic compression or limiting or multi-band compression being applied to the signal, and thus no squashing of peaks like you hear with DSP typically associated with Bluetooth speakers, for instance. So while the knobs say DSP, they are, for all intents and purposes, EQ filters with specific settings, primarily designed to adjust the sound signature of the monitors to your room’s shape and size, with an added safety measure being applied to the input at extreme volumes.
The Low DSP knob has four settings (L1, L2, L3, and L4), as does the High DSP knob (H1, H2, H3, and H4). The back panel has a diagram that shows what these settings correspond to. For both Low and High knobs, L1, L2, L3, and H1, H2, and H3 all mean the same things—Room 1, Flat, and Room 2, respectively. The last settings on each knob, L4 and H4, stand for Club Bass on the Low knob and Bright Treble on the High knob. It’s a little odd that these two get such clear descriptors while the other settings don’t, but the graph on the back clearly shows that Room 1 cuts out deep lows and dials back bright highs, focusing on mids, while Room 2 boosts bass around 50Hz, for a nice subwoofer-like range to add a couple decibels of push, and gradually adds in high frequencies starting around 4kHz.
Pioneer reps confirmed that switching to Flat mode isn’t a bypass for the DSP, it’s simply a relatively flatter sound signature. And Club Bass boosts the aforementioned 50Hz range by 5 decibels, while Bright Treble adds a bump at 4kHz and a much larger boost around 8kHz. Of course, the flexibility of the two knobs means you can mix and match to get the right balance. Common sense dictates that a good starting point would be Flat on both speakers, then adding in lows or highs according to the back panel charts. You’ll want to match the settings for left and right speakers.
Beyond the four rubber feet and a power cable that connects to the rear panel, there are no included accessories. The price is low enough that we wouldn’t expect anything additional to begin with, and most studio monitors don’t ship with extras, but we certainly wouldn’t complain if the speakers shipped with basic cabling.
VM-50 Audio Performance
For our testing, we connected two VM-50 monitors to a 2019 Apple iMac via a Universal Audio Apollo audio interface in an acoustically treated room. We tested a wide variety of audio, including everything from lossless audio files, to Apple Music, to in-progress ProTools HD studio recordings.
With both speakers in L2/H2 (Flat) mode, on tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” the low-frequency response is accurate and clean. The speakers can get quite loud—louder than a studio environment is likely to need—and I never detected the input limiting getting engaged, so if it was, the limiting is truly subtle.
We can confirm that whether you choose to listen in flat mode or boost the bass all the way, the sound signature ultimately leans toward accuracy. Whether you hear heavy lows or not is probably going to depend more on speaker placement. In our acoustically treated room, the monitors have plenty of room to breathe, with no wall or surface immediately behind them. That’s harder to pull off in most home settings, and if you have a wall within a foot of the speakers, it’s likely you won’t need either of the bass-boosting settings. But the point is, even when we pushed the speakers to their bass-boosted limits, their sound signature never resembled that of a mega-bass, overly boosted system like many of the models we test.
Bill Callahan’s “Drover,” a track with far less deep bass in the mix, gives us a better sense of the VM-50’s general sound signature. Back at flat settings, the drums on track are delivered with a clean, natural presence—they have some roundness and thump to them, but it’s subtle. You’d never describe their presence in the mix as heavy or thunderous, which is how they can sound on bass-forward speakers. Callahan’s baritone vocals are delivered with a perfect blend of low-mid richness and high-mid crispness, and the acoustic strums get ideal definition, sounding bright and airy. The mids often sound scooped out on this and many other tracks we test on bass-forward, sculpted speakers, but here the lows, mids, and highs are delivered ideally.
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On Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” the kick drum loop receives just the right high-mid presence, allowing its attack to retain its punchiness and the vinyl crackle and hiss to sit in their intended background layer of the mix. Often, when there’s too much high-frequency sculpting, we hear the vinyl crackle step forward a bit too much. The sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the beat can sound like pure thunder through the boosted-bass systems we often test, while here the deep lows are subtle both on the synth hits and the sustain of the drum loops when the speakers are in flat mode. When the knobs are adjusted to Club Bass, the drum loop gets beefier, but the sub-bass synth hits remain relatively staid—they are swimming in deep subwoofer territory these speakers don’t really dive into. The vocals on this track are delivered with ideal clarity and no added sibilance.
Orchestral tracks, like the opening scene from John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary, receive an ideal blend of lower-register instrumental representation and higher-frequency clarity. The higher-register brass, strings, and vocals take center stage and command your attention, while the lower-register instrumentation occasionally reaches for deeper notes that push things slightly beyond a subtle anchoring role. This becomes more pronounced in Club Bass mode, a setting definitely not designed for classical music, but one that doesn’t sound half bad on this track. That’s because, like the DSP here, it’s a slightly misleading term—there’s nothing club-like about this bass setting, but I guess it sounds a little more alluring than “50Hz +5dB.”
Affordable Speakers for Your Studio or Computer
For the price, the Pioneer DJ VM-50 speakers offer excellent clarity and the ability to adjust audio to a degree. For even less money, the $99 Mackie CR3-X speakers also deliver studio-friendly audio, albeit with less power. And if you’re just looking for a solid sound system for your computer as opposed to one that offers sonic accuracy for mixing, we’re fans of the Audioengine A1 ($199) and the 2.1 Harman Kardon SoundSticks 4 ($299). Neither of these systems have the same studio-friendly inputs as the VM-50, however. Ultimately, the VM-50 speakers deliver clear, accurate audio for those on a somewhat modest studio budget.
