Headphones vs Speakers - Which are Best for Mixing?
Headphones or studio monitors? Which is better for music production? Which is better for mixing and mastering? This is a common dilemma faced by people who are new to music production and mixing who are wanting to get the most out of their studio sessions and budget.
Headphones and studio monitors are both used widely by professional music producers and audio professionals and each has their own advantages and disadvantages.
There are also certain situations where one has a clear advantage over the other. Sometimes it simply comes down to practicality – headphones are the obvious choice for working remotely on a laptop.
In professional recording studios with high end monitoring setups, you may think that headphones wouldn’t be used at all. However, there are some experienced mixing and mastering engineers that work exclusively on headphones.
If you don’t have a decent listening environment or set of studio monitors, it’s still possible to get professional sounding mixes with headphones alone.
Let’s look at each in more detail:
Studio Monitors
Advantages of Studio Monitors
Having a set of speakers moving air helps to convey the power and feeling of the music. The physical sensation is another dimension that we experience music and is important for translating the emotion and sense of movement.
Listening on monitors in a real acoustic space is more representative of what your listener will experience listening to your track on speakers. Mixes made on studio monitors tend to translate better across a wide variety of speaker types and acoustic environments.
When your music is played on speakers, the sound is shaped by the acoustic environment on its way to our ears. The reverb in the mix blends with the reverb of the room to create the overall ambience.
Speakers also have crossfeed i.e. your right ear will hear some of the sound from the left channel and vice versa. In comparison, headphones don’t crossfeed and tend to overly emphasise the stereo elements in the mix. This is another reason why mixes made on headphones don’t translate as well on speakers.
If you mix on headphones you’re more likely to find yourself having to tweak it later unless you’re experienced and confident with mixing on headphones.
Room Acoustics
When listening on speakers, only 20% of the sound reaching your ears is the direct sound from the speakers. The other 80% is sound that is reflected from the walls and ceilings. The room has a huge impact on the sound, affecting the decay and frequency distribution of sounds.
Soundwaves reflected from walls and ceilings interact with each other, a phenomenon called interference. This causes some frequencies to be reinforced whilst others are cancelled out. This makes it difficult if not impossible to make accurate mixing decisions.
To avoid this, it is important to have the room and monitors set up in a way that minimises reflections and destructive interference. Room acoustics is a complex topic but there are a few simple principles that you can follow to optimize your setup.
A key part is the addition of acoustic treatment to absorb excess reflections, particularly the walls on either side of the listening position and the ceiling directly above the listing position.
The idea isn’t to completely absorb all reflected sound, but rather to achieve an appropriate balance of sound-reflecting and sound absorbing surfaces.
Choosing studio monitors
The exact brand or model of studio is less important than being familiar with the unique sound of your own setup. Listen to your favourite albums on your monitors and pay attention to how they sound. When mixing, reference your mix against professionally mastered commercial releases from the same genre. This will give you a goal to aim for in terms of the overall dynamics, hardness and tonal balance. Before you consider upgrading your studio monitors, first look at your room setup and invest in acoustic treatment as this will have a much more significant impact on the sound.
Be wary of very cheap speakers as they don’t accurately represent bass frequencies and are prone to distortion and phase issues.
I personally recommend ADAM Audio TV5 studio monitors. These will be an excellent choice for most home studios and give excellent detail and clarity across the frequency spectrum.
Headphones
Headphones have some immediately obvious advantages over studio monitors.
They are cheaper, more portable and don’t suffer from room effects like speakers do.
Headphones isolate you from the room, so that you hear only the direct sound and not the reflected sound. Closed back headphones give the best isolation and are great for recording as they prevent the sound from the headphones bleeding into the microphone. Closed back headphones are also better for working in places with background noise, like a café.
Open back headphones don’t provide as much isolation but they tend to give a more natural, transparent and detailed sound.
Headphones tend to be much more revealing of tiny details in a mix. This can inadvertently lead to adding details that don’t work well in an acoustic space. For example, smooth unbroken reverb tails that sound great in headphones may not work as well on speakers as the reverb produces a reverb of its own and leads to excess reverb and muddiness.
One mixing task where headphones are particularly useful is for level correcting bass. Headphones make it easier to detect subtle changes in volume of the low-end content.
A risk with headphones is that they make you more prone to listening too loud. This leads to a temporary threshold shift, affecting your hearing sensitivity and frequency perception and make it impossible to make accurate mixing decisions. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days for your hearing to return to full sensitivity.
Prolonged exposure can cause permanent changes in your hearing, so it’s important when using headphones to be vigilant in moderating your listening volume.
Choosing a set of headphones
Similar to studio monitors, there are many great options when it comes to selecting a pair of headphones and the exact brand or frequency response isn’t critical.
Be wary that with headphones, price doesn’t equate to quality and you should stick with a reputable audio brand that is designed for studio use.
Beyerdynamic’s DT990 Pro Studio Headphones are an excellent choice of open-back headphones for studio use.
For recording purposes, look at getting closed-back headphones such as Audio Technica’s M50x Studio Headphones.
To get the full performance out of your headphones, you will need to run them from a dedicated headphone amp. Most audio interfaces will have a headphone out port with a decent headphone amp built in.
Conclusions
Headphones and speakers both have their advantages and disadvantages for music production and mixing. The decision will come down to what you are trying to achieve and personal preference.
In the production phase, go with the option that you feel most comfortable with and gives you the most inspiration.
For mixing, a good pair of studio monitors can be greatly beneficial.
Especially in the final stages of mixing, you’ll want to check the low-end and overall balance of the mix on monitors.