Best methods to edit with headphones

[Timothy J. allen]

I have to chime in with a strong “NO” when it comes to using headphones for full-time monitoring. Your ears/brain will compensate for the headphone’s frequency range and for the sense of space that the headphones emulate and your mix will not be the same as it would be when you can hear the air being pushed around the room.

People tend to think that you hear with your ears. That’s true, but it’s really your whole body that acts as a conductor to bring sound waves to your brain. (Especially your skull and other bones.)

As I write this, I have some Sony MDR-V900HD headphones on – and I’m really enjoying hearing some details in music that I don’t normally get to enjoy. But even though they sound great, I certainly wouldn’t use them as my sole source for mixing. You don’t want to get tricked into the sense that that’s the way the viewers/listeners will hear it.

Headphones can really help you focus on details, but the tendency will then be to change levels and panning based on a false sense of detail. Big picture things… like phase canceling, or overall perception of loudness can even be more difficult to spot with headphones.

The reason high-end studios have engineers come in to “balance the room” isn’t to make the audio sound “good” in an edit suite – it’s to minimize the effects of the room and things in it that will influence or color your mix. The best environment gives you a flat “middle of the road” so that you don’t end up with a mix that compensates for the inefficiencies and tonal bias of your mixing environment – and adds things that don’t sound good in other environments.

All that said… there’s a reason audio engineers try their final mixes out on cheap car stereos and $29 CD players (not as a substitute, but in addition to their high-end studio equipment). You want a mix that will sound *as good as it can* wherever it is played. So… yes, use headphones when you need to do “detail work”, but make sure you have some air between you and some real near-field speakers for the majority of your work.

[Grinner Hester]

troof
At the last major network that I staffed for, we’d edit using the nice studio monitors. When time for the final mix, all was routed to the mono 25″ Curtis Mathis in the middle of the room. That’s how ya know whatcha got. Nevr were levels not tweeked a bit while doing this. It always aided to the final product.

The only headphones in the building were in the cubicles of producers.

…and select janitors.