Post-production Audio Work with Headphones instead of Studio Monitors?

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yabyum

Well-known member
Does anyone do this? I know Studio Monitors are the way to go, but I don't have the space for them...

I'm actually building somewhat of a portable filmmaking kit for myself... so I'm wondering if anyone uses headphones for post work?

If so, what headphones would be good for this? Right off the bat I would say that open air is a must, but other than that don't know.
 
terrible idea to do a final mix through phones.
The spacial placement, EQing, fx..etc will be way off from a typical home theater/tv system.

You could use phones for dialog editing (non eq) and over all sound editing (spending the time listening to fx libraries and placing them in your timeline..etc)
but anything mix related would be a very big mistake in my opinion.
 
+1.

Basic editing is fine with headphones. Any processing or mixing should be done on nice speakers in a decent room.


Besides, I've never come across 5.1 headphones...:grin:
 
yabyum said:
Does anyone do this? I know Studio Monitors are the way to go, but I don't have the space for them...

I'm actually building somewhat of a portable filmmaking kit for myself... so I'm wondering if anyone uses headphones for post work?

If so, what headphones would be good for this? Right off the bat I would say that open air is a must, but other than that don't know.
Click to expand...

You can edit with 'cans but mixing simply must be done on speakers. Phones deliver sound that is highly coloured and bears little to no resemblance to what viewers are going to hear on regular speakers. Because the drivers interact with the bones in your skull the frequency distribution you hear is quite different from what you hear with speakers. There are some problems, such as phase effects, that are totally inaudible on headphones and only become apparent when listening on speakers, .

For most sound production uses, open air phones would be the worst of your options to go with - you need to isolate what yourself from the rest of the environment when you're monitoring so you only hear what's being recorded without any extraneous sounds intruding. All serious studio monitors that I'm aware of are closed-back phones.
 
Ditto on all the above.

Even a set of decent sounding hi-fi speakers is better than any headphones for mixing. In addition to the points made above, headphones, since they sit directly outside your ears, create a massively exaggerated sense of separation between things, especially in the stereo field. So bad mixes generally sound much better on them, which is exactly what you don't want, unless *absolutely everyone* who ever hears them wears phones. Otherwise, you'll quickly find out that the mix, no matter how good it sounded on the phones, will almost certainly suck on speakers. Thankfully the reverse is generally not true - mixes that sound good on speakers usually sound good on phones too. That's why they're bad for mixing - they make things sound better than they may actually be. It's very easy to prove this point - just make a quick mix on cans and then listen to how unexpectedly different it sounds on speakers.

As has been pointed out, cans are great for editing, and for checking for odd noises, pop, glitches and the like that might have gone unnoticed on speakers. The 'magnifying' effect that makes them unreliable for mixing is a benefit where those sorts of issues are concerned.
 
Agree with all the above, but there is of course an exception, sort of. There is a box , no longer made, that was designed to allow editors/ mixers to premix with headphones and it works reasonably well. It's a LAKE HSM6240 originally a bit under $2K. You can sometimes find them on eBay for a couple of hundred dollars and I have a contact at Dolby who may still be able to get his hands on one as a special order. Dolby bought the technology from Lake (and the inventory). It's not speakers in a room but it's a lot closer than headphones alone. It helps a LOT with the ear fatigue that will kill you if you try to work with headphones all the time. And it does 5.1 quite plausibly. I used them when I was working in a closet (well a bit bigger) that was impossible to make acoustically acceptable for, well anything. They wanted to put in a "multi media surround" system and I convinced them that this would be much better, and it was.

If you have a chance to check one out do so they are pretty amazing boxes. As a side bonus there is a stereo out so you can encode a stereo track that will play in surround (on headphones) off of any player.


unclebob6958 said:
Besides, I've never come across 5.1 headphones...:grin:
Click to expand...
 
Focusrite added a new feature to the Saffire Pro 24...it's called VRM (Virtual Reference Monitoring). Might be interesting.

•VRM Virtual Reference Monitoring
Hear your mix in different environments, through different speakers and from different positions, just using headphones. http://www.focusrite.com/media/podcast/VRM_Podcast.mp3

...still, wouldn't recommend mixing on headphones....
 
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