When these things are taken into consideration, one can see why headphones used to be shunned by professional mixing and mastering engineers, aside from an occasional spot check here and there. Headphones also completely remove room acoustics from the equation, because with speakers, the sound that’s inevitably reflected off of the walls, floor and ceiling in any room will play a major role in the overall sound that’s perceived. With speakers, on the other hand, the left ear hears both the left and the right speaker and vice versa. Headphones beam each of the stereo channels directly into one single ear. During mix sessions in the control room, you’ll likely see a variety of loudspeakers and nobody wearing headphones.Ĭonsider that headphones provide the listener with a drastically different sonic experience as compared to speakers in a room. Have a look at photos or footage from any professional recording studio from the pre-digital era, and what you’ll likely see are musicians wearing closed-back headphones while recording overdubs (so the music feed wouldn’t leak out of the cans and into the microphone, which would pollute the recording).

But headphones were not to be used for mixing due to the fact that mixes done on headphones tended to translate poorly to speakers. When I first started in music production over twenty years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that closed-back headphones could be used for monitoring during tracking and any type of headphones could be used for certain editing tasks.

I found myself in a position where, if I wanted to work in my home studio while the baby was sleeping, headphones were my only option for monitoring.

But can we rely on headphones for music production tasks like editing, mixing and even mastering? I went down this rabbit hole a few years ago when I became a new father. Cans are an attractive option for those who don’t want to disturb the neighboring apartments late at night or wake up the sleeping roommates.

Anyone who’s attempted to regularly produce music in a space shared with others who may not be particularly appreciative of being exposed to studio monitors blaring at 85+ dB for hours and hours on end has likely thought of using headphones as a monitoring alternative.

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