There are two new articles in Audio Technology which I find very interesting.
This is an excellent series so far. Looking forward to the third installment.There are two new articles in Audio Technology which I find very interesting.
As those of you who have followed this column for any length of time can attest, headphone mixing is one of the big no-no's around these parts. In our humble opinion, headphone mixes do not translate well in the real world, period, end of story. Other than checking for balance issues and the occasional hunting down of little details, they are tools best left for the tracking process.
Can I mix on headphones?
No. But in all seriousness, headphones can be a secret weapon and it really doesn’t matter what they sound like…
Over time, after constantly listening back to my work from different studios on those headphones I really started to learn them. They became sort of a compass. Wherever I went… It became a pattern for me to reference these headphones to see if what I was hearing was “right”…
I learned them, I knew them, I trusted them. It didn’t matter whether or not I loved them…
So, can you mix on headphones? Probably. I just think you really need to put some time into learning them first…
According to content on ad driven platforms like youtube and forums. What I haven't encountered is formal educational literature concerning "headphone mixing". If that doesn't suggest that it wasn't ever a viable practice, consider that advertising departments exist to help capitalize on untapped segments of the market. Other than that, "relieve" a pro of their monitor speakers and show me how they are thriving under the new conditions.Mixing on headphones is becoming more common.
There’s an example in the Glenn Schick video directly above your post. Times do change, some adapt, others choose to not explore new possibilities. It’s all good.According to content on ad driven platforms like youtube and forums. What I haven't encountered is formal educational literature concerning "headphone mixing". If that doesn't suggest that it wasn't ever a viable practice, consider that advertising departments exist to help capitalize on untapped segments of the market. Other than that, "relieve" a pro of their monitor speakers and show me how they are thriving under the new conditions.
Mastering engineers end up doing more cleaning up(on speakers) of the mixing engineers work, because "mobile studios" are a growing thing. Conveniently this was left out in the promotional video you linked to. "Times do change."There’s an example in the Glenn Schick video directly above your post. Times do change, some adapt, others choose to not explore new possibilities. It’s all good.
LCR mixing is interesting. I’ve played with it quite a bit but have my reservations due to the issues with mono summing. I can definitely see how it would be effective for certain types of minimalist recordings though, especially if reducing the hard panning as you described.The 2nd article matches some of what I've found. Firstly I am not a pro mixer nor have I been doing it my whole life. For me I now use L-C-R mixing for multi-mike recordings. My preference is minimalist stereo miking, but sometimes practical factors make that a less good choice. With LCR, everything goes fully left, right or equally in both (center). Works better than it sounds like it would. I may do differing compression or frequency contouring for different tracks within a given LCR position. So if I do that, it sounds weird on headphones. I find changing panning from 100% left or right going with 85-88% sounds effectively identical on speakers, and makes the headphone listening no longer weird sounding instead sounding much like it does on speakers. I've basically added my interaural crosstalk like you experience with speakers for the headphones.
Should you make a phone based mix if most listeners use those which sounds good, but which collapses into not good over speakers? Who knows? I've certainly seen quite a few binaural recordings that are not good at all over speakers. Making phone-centric or speaker-centric recordings goes against the common idea of something that translates over almost every device. Chesky for one has switched to binaural from crossed figure 8 recordings. They do some other process said to make the recordings good over speakers too. I find it only partly successful and miss the quality their old recordings had.