M-Audio’s Studiophile speakers force every home-recorder to confront that most difficult of questions: Ugh, do I really sound like that?

I used to dream about making it as a podcaster. I listened to all the masters, read all the wikis, even bought a bunch of fancy recording gear. I planned out a year’s worth of weekly episodes and convinced myself that if I wanted it enough, if I networked enough, and if I kept my chin to the whetstone, I couldn’t help but one day rise to the level of a Karl Pilkington, or a Steve Novella. Foolish, blind hubris!

My dreams were finally shattered when I decided to invest in a nice set of studio monitors to help me mix down my recordings. Imagine my horror the first time I aired one of my rough mixes through these damnably high-quality noise-boxes!

The three-inch composite woofers accentuated the grotesquely guttural quality of the voice playing back to me. What a nauseating sound! To think that it emanated from a human throat! Could it really have been me?

Worse, the three-quarter-inch ferrofluid-cooled silk dome tweeters reproduced the wheezy, whistling noise of my nasal inhalations with appallingly high fidelity! The effect was like listening to a symphony in the key of suck.

What an idiot I’d been to fancy myself a rising star on the podcasting scene! No one born with functioning ears would ever tolerate this revolting noise! I was a joke! A horrible, horrible joke! I hurled my new monitors to the floor, intending to stomp them into splinters, but the cabinets are made of dense wood, and I get winded pretty easily.

How I hate these Studiophiles for what they took from me! But is it really them that I hate? Is it their fault my dreams were dashed? Called as expert witnesses to testify about my gifts as a podcaster, all they did was tell the truth.

The whole, awful, awful truth.

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