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Why mix on speakers when 87% listen on headphones?


whoisp

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According to statist survey, 87 percent of the respondents use their headphones to listen to music. In fact in the workplace, 93% reported wearing headphones to listen to music. You haev more and more engineers now mixing on things like air pods and a quick test on monitors which i find interesting.  Appears more and more musicians, engineers, and producers do it all the time.

 

 

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1 hour ago, DeeringAmps said:

Good question p!

 I “check” on cans, buds, and even the iPhone. But I still prefer “working” on the monitors. 
Old man, old ways die hard…

t

It's funny, i now preferer doing everything on headphones and will only test on speaks, its how we train our ears i guess 

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13 hours ago, treesha said:

I like to “feel” the music and find working on monitors energizing, but i do check on headphones near the end of the process. Monitors are just more enjoyable to me. 

That's how i feel with headphones, shut the whole world out and just feel the music and nothing else.  

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  • 4 weeks later...

Since I make music to please myself and I like to listen on both loudspeakers as well as headphones, I try to make it sound good for both.

People also listen to music on loudspeakers at clubs and when they watch TV and movies.

For long haul multiple hour mixing sessions, I can go either way. I have multiple sets of monitors that I like and multiple sets of headphones that I like.

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A crap mix can sound pretty darn good on my iPhone earbuds or my BeyerDynamic cans.  That same mix can sound horrible on real speakers, in the real world.  So...

I mix with monitors until a mix sounds great on other speakers, in the real world.  Any mix that passes that test also sounds great on decent headphones.

That's where I land.

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4 hours ago, HOOK said:

A crap mix can sound pretty darn good on my iPhone earbuds or my BeyerDynamic cans.  That same mix can sound horrible on real speakers, in the real world.  So...

I mix with monitors until a mix sounds great on other speakers, in the real world.  Any mix that passes that test also sounds great on decent headphones.

That's where I land.

Yes i test on monitors with & without sub and average headphones but trained my ears to mix on the my cans now

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 11/15/2023 at 2:13 PM, HOOK said:

I mix with monitors until a mix sounds great on other speakers, in the real world.  Any mix that passes that test also sounds great on decent headphones.

Bit late to the party but all of my mixes are produced with various O/P sources having gone through the HOOK test ...  gonna keep that one.

I wonder how much we've all spent over the years on H/phones/ear buds ( and these I hate ) but.. and studio monitors just to get it right for most people that don't really care  as long as it's hot ... Hmm ( I think that's what WHOISP was getting at .. or not )

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9 minutes ago, Supa Reels said:

Bit late to the party but all of my mixes are produced with various O/P sources having gone through the HOOK test ...  gonna keep that one.

I wonder how much we've all spent over the years on H/phones/ear buds ( and these I hate ) but.. and studio monitors just to get it right for most people that don't really care  as long as it's hot ... Hmm ( I think that's what WHOISP was getting at .. or not )

Yeah.  That's the thing, right?  Never sounds the same ANYWHERE.  So...meh...it's like looking at a painting in different lighting.  Never looks the same.  If it's truly cool, the things that matter get heard and seen...and people relate.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I do mix mainly on headphones, but I tend to miss how much bass is coming out of the song.  So, I listen using Yamaha HS5s for bass comparison.  They help me avoid creating a song with "too much rumble".

I once mixed a song using headphones only, took it to a brand new mini van, and it rumbled so horribly!  I realized I had to get some monitors, so I could hear that, and prevent that!

Once I got the monitors, I was able to correct the rumble!

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 12/24/2023 at 5:44 AM, El Diablo said:

I do mix mainly on headphones, but I tend to miss how much bass is coming out of the song.  So, I listen using Yamaha HS5s for bass comparison.  They help me avoid creating a song with "too much rumble".

I once mixed a song using headphones only, took it to a brand new mini van, and it rumbled so horribly!  I realized I had to get some monitors, so I could hear that, and prevent that!

Once I got the monitors, I was able to correct the rumble!

Sure it wasn't a flat tyre ....... LOL?

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  • 1 month later...

A great mix on speakers will usually translate well to headphones

A mix that sounds great on headphones can often sound unbalanced when heard on speakers ( but that's not to say you can't learn them ) 

There are lots of reasons why this is the case, some of them are to do with having a driver so close to our ear drums and the individual shape of our ear canals. This can skew the frequency response but is somewhat negated by using speakers as there is more air in between you and the source, some of it is to do with how frequencies combine from each side before they reach our ears which you don't get unless your headphones/controller has a crosstalk feature. Some of it is to do with how quickly ear fatigue sets in which is as much a psycho-acoustic phenomana as anything.

There's no one size fits all solution, some people can't have speakers in the enviromnent they mix in  and if a room is poorly treated it may actually be better to take the room of the equation and use cans.

Personally I would rather mix on proper studio monitors, but my room is well treated and relatively flat so I know it will translate well but my 2nd reference are a set of Slate VSX headphones which can convincingly emulate a number of different listening environments including various headphone types, earbuds etc

My best mixes will sound good across all of these emulations so no matter where it gets played you know it will sound as you intended.   

This quote from SOS mag sums it best for me.

image.png.9a8e83cb2f723af37941b25318df408c.png 

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/mixing-on-headphones-pro-perspective

Edited by Mark Morgon-Shaw
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  • 1 month later...

I bought room/speaker equalization software matched to my headphones and mixes we just ok. Then, in a studio move I stopped using equalization software temporarily and mixed mainly on headphones.

To my surprise the mixes translated best without the EQ stuff mixing mainly on headphones. Go figure. I found that if the mix sounded bad it was something I either should have done or didn't do to the mix. 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

A band in the late 70's and 80's called "The Cars" used to mix on car speakers, since that's how most people were listening to music back then.

Today, I mix on closed-back headphones (to tweak the EQ and L-R balance on the stereo tracks), and then I master on open-back headphones to get a little ambience since ear buds are technically not a closed-back headphone. The reason some car audio systems sound like crap is because most headphones have a frequency response of 20-20,000 Hz, but most car audio systems don't.

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