Headphones for Mixing

The typical music consumer these days is listening on earbuds or headphones. Or maybe on the tiny speakers in their smartphone. Few are listening on speakers, at least none of any reasonable quality.

It makes sense for us to take this into consideration when we mix a song.

Engineers have always had to make adjustments and compromises in order for their mixes to translate well for the public. Since most of your work will be heard on some sort of personal listening device, it is often good to either mix using headphones, or at least check the mix that way.

In this episode, I talk about my personal preference for headphones for mixing and listening, which goes back decades. Sure, I use the studio monitor speakers as another reference, but when it comes to details, I just hear more with the headphones. This is especially true when editing.

Everyone has to develop their own approach to this, and I expect many people prefer monitoring and mixing through their expensive monitor speakers. And there are times when speakers are the way to go, such as when more than one person has to listen, or when you want to get that visceral experience of feeling the bass.

Many people in the world of recording were saddened to hear of the death of Joe Tarsia, founder of Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia. Joe was a pioneer, always on the forefront of new technology. Many successful engineers came up under Joe’s mentorship. I know I will miss the interesting conversations I had with Joe, going back to the late 1960s.

You can listen to my conversation with Joe Tarsia from 2020 in episode 26. Here is the link:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/942952/5418067

There is also a YouTube video of the same conversation, with some extra content, including a series of photos from Joe’s career:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMwTQ8XhY9c

email: dwfearn@dwfearn.com
www.youtube.com/c/DWFearn
https://dwfearn.com/

Transcript

74 Headphones                                                28 December 2022

 I’m Doug Fearn and this is My Take On Music Recording

Before today’s episode, I need to report that legendary engineer and studio owner Joe Tarsia passed away recently. Joe’s career started in the 1950s with Cameo Parkway Records. In the 1960s, he founded Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia, which was the studio that recorded of an amazing number of hit records in the 1970s and beyond. Although mostly noted for his work with R&B producers and songwriters Gamble and Huff, Sigma also recorded major artists from many genres.

Joe was an inspiration to me early in my recording career. He was always happy to share anything he knew. Many fine engineers came up under Joe’s mentorship.

I was proud to know Joe as a friend. We always had the most interesting conversations. He was a skilled electronics guy as well as having amazing ears. That combination is rare today. It allowed Sigma to create some remarkable sounds, way ahead of anyone else.

You can hear an interview I did with Joe Tarsia in episode 26 of this podcast from September 2020. There is also a video version, with still photos from Joe’s career, on YouTube. The link is in the description.

Although retired for many years, Joe maintained his connections with the recording world. I know I am among many of us in this business that will miss him. Thanks, Joe.

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My first experience listening to music in stereo was with headphones. I found an old turntable, built a phono preamp, and coupled it to a pair of amplifiers I built for another project. I had to buy a stereo phono cartridge to complete my listening setup. I did not have speakers, at least none of any quality and certainly none that matched.

I bought a pair of Koss Pro 4 headphones and plugged them into my makeshift phono chain. I could not believe my ears! The sense of being in an actual acoustic space was overwhelming. I could hear everything so much better than I could through a mono speaker.

It wasn’t long before I had a pair of AR3 speakers and a real stereo power amplifier. It was vacuum tube, of course. Everything was tubes back then.

The speakers sounded OK, but I still preferred the sound of my headphones. When I wanted to study a recording, I found that headphones were much more revealing.

A couple of years later I built my first studio. I used the AR speakers initially, but they obviously were not meant to be studio monitors. But they did allow all involved with the session to listen at the same time. When it was just me, I often used headphones.

I rapidly upgraded the speakers to Altec 604s, the standard for monitors for decades. They were very efficient and could make a lot of noise, even with a 25-watt tube amplifier. Soon, I went to a 300-watt solid-state amplifier, which allowed me to reproduce clean, realistic levels for my clients.

When I would take a mix home to listen, I used headphones, even though I had decent speakers at home. I could just hear more with headphones.

In this episode, I will limit my discussion of headphones to monitoring. The requirements for headphones for musicians in the studio are quite different.

So why have I always preferred listening with headphones? I can think of several reasons.

First, they put you right into the recording. Long before immersive audio formats, there was stereo, which was a huge step up from mono. For many of the record label projects, we always monitored in mono. It was the way things were done back then because few people had stereo systems at home. All broadcasting was in mono, and radio was the streaming service of the day. But we equipped our studios with stereo monitoring, since it was presumed that it was the format of the future.

Secondly, headphones eliminate the room where you were listening. My control room sounded pretty good, and I understood how to make my home listening environment as good as a small room could be. But the room always smeared the sound, to my ears. It added another layer of acoustic environment to the studio room sound. Often that was confusing to the ear because it piled a little room on top of a big room. It never sounded believable.

Headphones channel the audio directly into your ears – there is no listening room whatsoever. That made headphones a better analytical tool, in my opinion.

Thirdly, I could listen to music at home as loud as I wanted without bothering anyone. When I lived in an apartment, that was a necessity, since I usually only had time to listen late at night. Later, with a house and family, headphones let me listen to things over and over without bothering anyone. 

I think if there is anything that will drive a lay person up a wall it is a recording session where the same thing is played over and over again. People not involved in the recording process can only take a few minutes of that before they want to leave. There are exceptions, of course, but that is the general reaction. I could listen at home to the same thing for an hour and no one was bothered by it.

Fourth, headphones for me are a necessity for editing. What may sound like a decent edit is often painfully deficient In headphones. In the days of tape, edits were made by rocking the reels back and forth, trying to find exactly where the downbeat was, for example. Any room sound would muddy that up. Headphones allowed much more precise edits.

In digital audio, edits can often be refined on-screen, which is a tremendous improvement over tape splicing. But I still find it easier to edit with headphones.

I find that near-field monitors are always lacking in the bottom octave. They just do not go down low enough in frequency response to reveal any problems in the low end. A sub-woofer can help, but often I find that sub-woofers make the bass louder but less defined. Good headphones can have better low response than anything but large monitor speaker systems. I find headphones a good way to listen for problems in the low end. I will hear things in the headphones that I could not hear in my near-field speakers.

I can also hear any phase problems more readily in headphones. I still check mono compatibility to make sure there is no great change in quality or balance due to phase problems, but usually I hear those problems instantly in the headphones.

Of course, headphones also have their downsides. Here a few of them:

They can be loud, but they cannot give you the visceral feeling of the bass as you could get with speakers at high volume. The sound is are not coupled to your body like you would be listening to speakers in a room. That’s not important to me, since I do not listen loud, even to music that is naturally played loud. If I can feel the bass coming out of my speakers, I know that the level is probably loud enough to damage my hearing. But that thump is important to many people, musicians, producers, and listeners. Speakers are the way to get that.

The stereo separation is totally different from the speaker reproduction of the same music. What sounds like a great stereo spread in speakers may make the mix sound very different in headphones. This can be overcome with experience, after many hours of listening to both and determining the compensations necessary. There are software solutions that claim to replicate the speaker stereo field in headphones, but I have never tried that.

Unless you are set up to provide headphones for everyone else that needs to hear what you hear, there is no way to provide a roomful of people with the playback. And with everyone wearing headphones, communication is a pain. Speakers are better for that scenario.

A good set of headphones will usually cost a lot less than comparable quality speakers. You might pay a thousand dollars for a top-of-the-line pair of headphones, while speakers of the same capability will probably cost at least ten times as much.

Despite what we like music to sound like, listeners are the final arbiter of what we record. They make their judgement based on whether the song appeals to them or not. The song itself is always paramount, and often the only thing that most listeners will have any awareness of.

We have no control over how the listener is going to experience the music we record. They are all individuals who have their own preferences for how they want to listen to their music. Everyone is different, so we have no way to know how to reach them most effectively.

If the song has no appeal to them, then what we do does not matter much. But assuming a good song, every one of your consumers is going to have a different listening situation.

For most of the history of recorded music, the public listened on systems we would consider terrible-sounding. Consumer electronics were pretty awful by studio standards. Speakers, in particular, were awful. The products were built to a price that would make sense to average person, to whom music was often just something to obliterate silence. In addition, the consumer listening format was severely limited in quality. Manufacturers of home audio equipment had no incentive to make the reproduction any better than the limitations imposed on the listener.

Digital audio has made studio-quality audio available to the listener, if they seek something better than CD quality. But for most consumers, MP3 or equivalent is perfectly fine with them. The technology has the potential to be provide a much better listening experience, but for the consumer, it has never delivered it.

The data-reduced formats like mp3 are amazing, but they sound obviously inferior to those of us accustomed to studio quality sound. Even the CD is not a high-definition format. It was developed over 40 years ago and never did sound very good. This probably helps explain why vinyl outsells CDs these days, although that may not mean much since the market for physical media is miniscule.

But physical media like that represent only a tiny fraction of how music is consumed today. Data-compressed formats over a streaming service or YouTube are how most people listen.

And what do they listen on? The smart phone is probably the single largest category of consumer audio systems. And some people listen to the tiny stereo speakers less than two inches apart on their phone, especially if they want to share the music with someone else. How can that possibly sound good? I cannot stand that sound for even a few seconds.

I have no research to back this up, but my observation is that most people listen with earbuds, or maybe a cheap set of headphones.

In any case, no one is hearing your mix the way you heard it in your control room monitors. That has always been a challenge, as engineers figured out long ago, and made compensations in their mix to make the song sound good for the average listener.

That’s still true today, but now I suspect that the majority of listeners are using headphones or earbuds. That means we have to take that listening scheme into account as we mix.

Most mix engineers evaluate their mixes in several different listening scenarios. They might listen on a phone speaker, laptop speakers, cheap computer speakers, plus earbuds and typical consumer headphones.

After doing this for a while, mixers will know how the sound in their big speakers will translate for the listener. They may still check those other reproducing systems, but rarely do they encounter any surprises.

Since headphones are the predominant listening transducer, it makes sense to me to mix with headphones. A lot of engineers do that these days.

I’m not mixing hit records these days, but I do want to give the people I am producing the best shot at reaching the average listener. I have developed my own approach to mixing, which I will share. But as always, you have to determine what works best for you. I suspect I am an outlier with my method, but I hope it will give you something to think about.

My approach starts at the most basic level. That is, the song, the key, the tempo, and the instrumentation. These things may change, but I need an organized starting point. Then I achieve as much of the final sound in the studio, with mic selection and placement. I have talked about this before, so I won’t go into detail today.

As I am working on a song, I am constantly refining the mix so that when it comes time to actually mix the song, most of the work is already done. The same could apply if you have someone else mixing the song for you.

So now it’s time for the final process before the song joins the millions of others out there already.

I start from where I left off when tracking. I listen in the monitor speakers for the first portion of the mix, where I may be adjusting outboard gear as needed. The same would apply to plugins. The speakers allow me to move around the control room as necessary.

My control room is small. Too small to really sound good. Once I get more than a couple of feet behind the best location for my nearfield monitors, the room starts to intrude. It makes the sound less precise and I cannot make any adjustments. So I have to stay close to the monitors.

I try to stick with the speakers as long as I can. But at some point, as things are refined and adjustments move beyond the broad and general and into the details, I switch to headphones. I use a Beyer-Dynamic set, and I am not even sure of the model number. They were the top-of-the-line model from about ten years ago. They are the best headphones I have ever used, although I think there are newer models from several manufacturers that I should look into.

You will find the right headphones for you.

As soon as I put on the headphones, I am immediately transported into the music. I hear much more detail and nuance. I can feel the space, whether It is a real physical room or one created with reverb and ambience devices.

At that point, I usually hear panning conflicts that were not obvious in the speakers. I hear more low-end, and that might cause me to adjust the mix or maybe eq, if I am using eq. I usually do not use any eq on individual instruments.

I am suddenly much happier with the way the song sounds.

I keep the monitor level low. I use a monitor control system that I built for myself about 20 years ago – tube of course. It has a remote stepped level control with 1dB steps. I always start my mix at a specific monitor level. That may change depending on the nature of the music, but I always start at the same point, to give me a consistent reference level.

Then it is just a matter of fine-tuning the details. If I have done a good job of recording the tracks, the mix is quick.

But before I finish, I put my new mix back on the speakers and see if anything sounds wrong. Usually I am only disappointed in the loss of detail. It’s not often I change the balance of the sounds, although that does happen occasionally.

Then I put it through a tiny consumer speaker that sounds very much like a phone. That is terribly deflating, but it does reveal any problems that result from losing the bottom two or three octaves. The little speaker also makes the vocals a lot louder in the mix. I have to resist making any major change in the vocal level.

And finally, I run the mix through the “big” monitors and leave the control room and walk away so that the volume is just enough to understand the words. I may repeat that with my phone emulator speaker. If it still sounds good, I am done.

Your approach is undoubtedly different and that is as it should be. We all need to find what works best for us.

The main thing I want to emphasize is that headphones are an important part of my process. I rarely use them while tracking, except maybe to help track down a source of noise or bleed from other instruments.

I never have the audio going through both headphones and speakers at the same time.

I also know that when I hand someone the headphones to listen, they are usually unimpressed. They prefer the speakers. That’s a perfect example of how everyone is different.

If you can’t afford the monitor speakers of your dreams, headphones may be a good idea, until you can justify the cost of great speakers.

And the music consumer will mostly be hearing your work in headphones or earbuds, so it makes sense to be sure your recording and mix sounds good for them.

Thanks for listening, subscribing, and commenting. This podcast is carried by virtually all podcast services. Please help me expand my reach by suggesting it to your friends and posting it on social media. Thanks.

I am also interested in your comments on this or any other episode.

My email is dwfearn@dwfearn.com

This is My Take On Music recording. I’m Doug Fearn. See you next time.

Joe Tarsia YT link:  https://www.buzzsprout.com/942952/5418067