On Fri, 06 Dec 2002, Simon M Pascoe wrote: >does anyone have any recommendations for quality headphones for monitoring (ie; not DJ headphones) please ? > sImon Pascoe
***Simon: Sony's MDR-V600 are good headphones, and thus good for any type of listening. But, I would strongly caution you against producing only with headphones. If you produce with just headphones, your brain and your ears will work together to make things sound better than they really are and psychoacoustically fill in the sonic holes. Then when you play something on a speaker system that you've produced while monitoring on headphones, you will find that your balances will be off (too much/too little of different frequencies). I broke this rule a month or so back and it was obvious: I had been working on a remix for Tristan (Phonopsia) and decided to play with my rough version during a live PA. All was sounding great till I dropped in the bassline I had created and--even over the club's system--it just wasn't cutting it. Turned out that I had done the bassline one night while my girlfriend was over; she was really tired and had gone to bed, and I was working on headphones so as not to disturb her. So the rest of the remix, that which had been done on monitors, was fine, but the balance, because I had done it on headphones, wasn't all that it was cracked up to be because my ears and my brain had made it sound better and more "right" than it really was. (Over the headphones, it was like "wow, this is a sweet bassline"; over the club speakers--and mind you, everything else sounded great--it was like "uh, what the hell is this?") Note to Tristan: Don't worry, I'll be fixing this! :) So, if you want to get a bit of work done--say late at night--and don't want to disturb room mates/partners with your work, use the headphones to get some rough work done (editing sounds, things like that that aren't frequency and balance-based) and not disturb them, but it is best to use monitors and headphones when getting into EQing, mixdowns, mastering, etc-- monitors to get the balances right, and then headphones later to listen to the quieter and more detailed parts, fade outs, listen for unwanted clicks, errors, etc, and fine tune 'em. Hope this helps. Take care. Andrew albums out now: Sprung (http://bip-hop.com) More Destructive Than Organized (http://staalplaat.com) Highest Common Denominator (http://pieheadrecords.com) Physical and Mental Health (http://dialrecords.com) 74'02 (split with Hypo) (http://tsunami-addiction.com) check Cognition (http://techno.ca/cognition) for upcoming appearance and release updates __________________________________________________________ Get your FREE personalized e-mail at http://www.canada.com
