Whad'ya Mean I Can't Mix With Headphones???? by Bruce Valeriani, Mar 1/2003 (updated DEC 2011)

On many of the recording forums I participate or moderate on, this question comes up time and again. While it's understandable when recording novices raise the question, but even more intermediate recordists don't seem able to grasp the limitations on the use of headphones (also known as 'cans') in the studio.

Here's what headphones ARE useful for - critical listening for noises/click/pops (that sometimes aren't obvious on monitors), sonic flaws on individual tracks or mixes, and monitoring during tracking where the use of monitors would cause unwanted bleed. That's it.

"Hey! You left out mixing....!!"
Funny how that worked out, considering the title of the article...  the truth is, headphones ARE NOT good for mixing -- as a matter of fact, headphones don't make good tools at all for ANY sonic decisions with respect to EQ or tonal changes.

"What are you talking about? Headphones take the room out of the equation, so it should make my mixes sound more consistent."
Well... audio production in general, is full of techniques/procedures that may at first appear to be common sense, but turn out to be the completely-wrong approach. While it's true that headphones DO take the room out of the equation, they also put your ears into two individual and very small, separate rooms all their own! Which leads to two issues...

1) Proximity and isolation - in using headphones, both your sense of stereo imaging and frequency response change... imaging is exaggerated due to the isolation of one ear from the other, and frequency response gets skewed in the bass and mid-range areas due to the proximity of the drivers to the ear. So you can't be sure of the relative levels of frequencies in that area of the spectrum.

Don't believe me? Try a simple test... Slap a pair of headphones on a decent-sounding synth/keyboard and find a patch you think sounds good through the phones. Now take the cans off and play that exact patch back through using monitors. 95% of the time you will hear a huge difference and the choice you made using headphones won't sound quite right played back on monitors, although it may have sounded excellent on the cans. Now imagine the same thing except with something as complex-sounding as a mix! As a matter of fact, try it - mix something using ONLY headphones, and then mix it again with monitors. The headphone mix will almost always be WAY off in terms of sonic balance.

2) Same headphones, different people - not only is response and imaging skewed using headphones, but to make matters worse, each person hears differently from every other person when listening on cans. The reason for this is that the response of each person's cilia (the parts of the ear responsible for detecting different frequency vibrations) is unique to each individual. This is critical because it means that the same song, through the same phones, will sound different to each person that listens to it! And you thought translating mixes using monitors is tough!!! With headphones it's almost impossible because a well-balanced sound is a moving target from person to person!

"But wait.... so what if the response is different for each person, why is that any different from monitors?"
That's a good question - it shows you're thinking! There's a huge difference.... the "personalized-response" effect is much more pronounced with headphones due to the proximity of the cones to a person's ears. With monitors, the room acts as a frequency-response leveler, giving a more uniform response to each person hearing them, but with headphones, it's virtually direct contact between ears and the cones, there's no room effect to "level-out" the response.

The bottom line is... headphones are tools. Like any tool, there's a fairly well-defined set of tasks they are appropriate for. You can try to use a screwdriver to hammer a nail, but it won't be very effective. Headphones have equally well-defined uses - checking for low-level noises, small ticks/pops, and other details - but NOT for use as a mechanism upon which to base any sort of sonic/tonal decision... which naturally includes mixing!

So save your pennies... get a second job... borrow yet again from your family... but you NEED to get a pair of studio monitors to work with. Even budget monitors will serve you better than trying to mix with headphones! Your mixes will thank you.

Happy Recording!

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Bruce Valeriani is the owner/engineer of Blue Bear Sound in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.