Mixing on headphones are creating problems or is it a myth?

[Aytekrocks]

Hello guys. I have been following the forum for several months. I have debunked some of my beliefs, but I still have endless questions due to my current state. I am a musician with 15 years of experience; most of the time I played gigs, but I also had a different job. I made an album and I really love making and listening to music. Several years ago, I started doing some mixing and ear training with SoundGym.

I started with closed-back headphones (ATH M50x), then got Beyerdynamic DT 990 pro, bought Ollo X1 (but returned it), and I have HS5 monitors with a decent amp, using Logic Pro. But most of the time I only use headphones with corrective EQ. I use my HS5s mainly for listening to music I love.

Nowadays I am more into listening critically, focusing on transients, frequencies, and stereo field. I check my mixes on AirPods, car speakers, TV speakers, and Bluetooth speakers.

At this point, I feel like mixing with headphones leads my decisions to be somewhat dull. I tend to make the same moves on almost every record and mix. Then when I check on AirPods, I notice there is almost always a 700–800 Hz boost, either a lack of sub energy or too much sub information, and a general dullness. Stereo also always sounds artificial.

I know my questions may sound unusual, but I have to ask:

1. Is mixing and mastering with headphones, even if widely used, creating my problems?
2. For a small bedroom setup, is there a way to properly integrate my HS5 monitors into my mixing workflow?

Thanks in advance. It is a great platform indeed! Have a nice day!

 

[Vincent Kars]

These 2 pictures I do think demonstrate the difference between speakers and headphones nicely.

Stereo recordings are made to be listened to over a pair of speakers.
The left ear of the listener will hear the sound of the left speaker and a fraction later, the right ear will hear this sound too although slightly modified (HRTF, head-related transfer function).
The left ear will also hear the sound from the right speaker, this time it will be the one receiving the signal a fraction later.
Mutatis mutandis the right ear.
Above also applies to the indirect sound bouncing of the walls, floor and ceiling.

When listening to a stereo recording using a headphone, each ear will receive 1 and 1 channel only. No mixing, no delay, no indirect sound coming from the surfaces of the room. The latter means that the room acoustics are eliminated.
The result is an increased spatialization, a barrage of details.

Can imagen if you mix using a headphone and it sounds "right", you have compensated for the increased spatialization hence it will sound congested using speakers.

 

[Redacted]

Yup. Binaural vs. stereo.

 

[somebodyelse]

It also depends on the headphone playback chain. If you're applying HRTF you may be hearing something close to a pair of speakers in a room. Apple's personalised spatial audio is probably the easiest - are you using that with your AirPods? Impulcifer (among others) offer a DIY route, and there are other commercial options aimed at studio use.

 

[goat76]

I have tried mixing my own recorded music using headphones, but the result has always been super weird, thin, small, and with way too much reverb applied to everything in the mix.

I’m both fascinated and a bit jealous of people who can do it, as that would make it possible for me to mix late at the evening without disturbing the neighbors. Maybe I just need a room emulation program of some sort, but I doubt that they sound realistic/convincing enough to fully replace the acoustics of a real room. Trying to simulate a convincing sense of listening distance to a pair of virtual loudspeakers is probably the hardest part to do in such a program.

 

[TK_IIVI]

1. Is mixing and mastering with headphones, even if widely used, creating my problems?
2. For a small bedroom setup, is there a way to properly integrate my HS5 monitors into my mixing workflow?

1. Could very well be. Like Vincent wrote you're missing out on a lot when listening to 'just' headphones. About a year ago or so I set up my headphone monitoring to emulate my room setup. I work on a 5.1 system but also have a Grace headphone amp and various headphones. What I did was I got a room emulation plugin and put that in the headphone monitoring chain, in addition to which it compensates for the headphone brand (or generics, and I did a gentle tweak myself).

What I found was that I could get relatively close to how the speakers feel in the room. In other words I'm maybe getting far more detail running the headphones without emulation, but that doesn't feel at all like listening for real in the room to my speakers, whereas when I turn that emulation on I can mix much closer to how I would normally mix without headphones. Just the balance ends up being better as well as the experience.

It's still not really the same thing, but to me it works way better.
(incidentally, I mix sound-to-picture, i.e. "TV" content, not music)

2. I mean, probably... Control acoustics as much as you can given the speaker placement. Shift between them and headphones like you already are....

 

[Redacted]

I have tried mixing my own recorded music using headphones, but the result has always been super weird, thin, small, and with way too much reverb applied to everything in the mix.

I’m both fascinated and a bit jealous of people who can do it, as that would make it possible for me to mix late at the neighbors'. Maybe I just need a room emulation program of some sort, but I doubt that they sound realistic/convincing enough to fully replace the acoustics of a real room. Trying to simulate a convincing sense of listening distance to a pair of virtual loudspeakers is probably the hardest part to do in such a program.

Look up Glenn Fricker on youtube - he has a tip every so often, but mostly for metal mixes.

 

[Aytekrocks]

Thank you all for the answers and suggestions. I really miss my early years — one guitar amp, 2 speakers, simple gigs. Cutting lows on the vocals, cutting highs on the guitar, and that was it.

Now I feel like I’m constantly fighting endless sessions with endless tracks just to make something sound good. Most of the time I end up thinking, “Maybe this is just my limit.”

I also want to add a question. I recently asked an expert about this and the answer was negative, but I know there are engineers here with many different levels of experience, so maybe someone has other ideas:

In a 10 square meter room with Yamaha HS5s, is there any realistic way to achieve a reasonably flat listening environment?

 

[Henrik]

In a 10 square meter room with Yamaha HS5s, is there any realistic way to achieve a reasonably flat listening environment?

Define "reasonable flat" in max dB nulls and peaks.

 

[Aytekrocks]

80hz to 15khz ±3 dB. I really want to mix with speakers not with headphones..

 

[Redacted]

You can't. It's all guess and fiddle

Better off getting a couple more pairs of different speakers and seeing how the sound is when you switch between them all.

Or trying a putative stereo mix, as a FLAC file, on a mate's stereo.

 

[krabapple]

You simply must have a pair of these

Auratone 5C Super Sound Cube

Auratone’s classic ‘grotbox’ is back. How does it compare with its modern imitators?

www.soundonsound.com

 

[Henrik]

80hz to 15khz ±3 dB. I really want to mix with speakers not with headphones..

Then my answer is no. I do not think you can achieve a ±3 dB listening environment, even using your HS5s, which has a sparse low-end.

Maybe you are planning on using room correction? If so, the response will look flatter on the screen when corrected, and it will most likely sound better, but it still won't be optimal, if you experience large (±10 dB) nulls and peaks due to floor, desk or ceiling reflections, which is quite common. Pushing +10 dB of 100 Hz into the speakers to counter a cancellation at your mix position is just not optimal.

Mixing on headphones eliminate all of that. But it took me a long time to realize that almost no pair of headphones are suited for mixing duties (to my ears). The tonality (tuning) and transient response is way off for mixing purposes in most cases. The Slate VSX IM1 is capable and that's what I use, together with normal studio monitors. Because using both is faster and more relaxing.

 

[VisualDarkN]

Me double tracking guitars with 100% pan in headphones = Sounds tight enough!
Same mix on speakers = Spiky frequencies, atrocious tuning and off timing.

Headphones hide so much stereo issues, even when you decrease the panning.

 

[Redacted]

Well yes... One is two mono tracks, in binaural mode, and the other is stereo where the L and R interfere and modulate.

 

[Eric Natural]

Isn't it true that 90%+ of consumer listening is Spotify-type streaming > earbuds ? It seems a mix should be able to translate to the wide usage of them. If my mix sounds good on standard studio monitors, will that also translate as intended to earphones ?

 

[somebodyelse]

And back we come to there being no standard for music recordings, in contrast to movies. If you make a mix on standard studio monitors then it will sound much as people have become accustomed to things sounding on headphones or earbuds, while people with something that renders it to binaural (say Apple's Spatial Audio, probably the most used one) will get something that sounds more like what you heard on the monitors. If you mix to binaural (aiming for headphone use) it'll sound close to what you heard for people with similar HRTF to you, but less so for others, and it won't be easy to correct for. People won't be able to use it with things like Spatial Audio either (well...they could, but it'll sound wrong). On that basis I'd say mix for monitors, and check it still sounds decent on normal headphones and/or earbuds.

 

[Redacted]

Isn't it true that 90%+ of consumer listening is Spotify-type streaming > earbuds ? It seems a mix should be able to translate to the wide usage of them. If my mix sounds good on standard studio monitors, will that also translate as intended to earphones ?

No idea what the 90% do, and I'm not bothered.
I suspect a given mix that sounds good on speakers, with all the room effects and the fact that both of your ears get some of both L & R speakers, it seems sensible to check how that sounds on headphones and vice-versa. I assumed, perhaps wrongly that all studios use both.

 

[Mr. Swordfish]

Way back in the 80s and 90s, I recorded a bunch of live concerts for NPR and affiliates. This was live-to-two-track in close proximity to the PA and only one chance to get the mix right. I found that monitoring via headphones produced the highest quality recordings, mainly because I could hear phase cancellation from the multiple microphones more accurately than I could with the speakers bouncing the sound off the walls and adding additional phase cancellation.

In sum, what made these multi-microphone recordings clearest was minimizing phase cancellations, and headphones gave the clearest image of that. Sometimes I had to compromise the mix to minimize phase e.g. I recently listened to a live recording I made of Dr. John - there was so much bleed of everything into the piano mics that I had to undermix the piano or everything else would sound "blurry" "far away" "indistinct" or as I would say "phasy".

This is what worked for me in those circumstances. Fortunately, I was hundred of miles from NPR headquarters in DC where they were so down on mixing via headphones that they removed the headphone jacks from all the control rooms. But I've always gone my own way in so many areas.

I'd say if you have the luxury of multiple chances to create a mix in a quiet environment not adjacent to a big PA system (which is almost standard these days unless you're doing live broadcasts), listen on multiple monitoring technologies and if it sounds good on most or all of them, that's probably the keeper. Headphones can be a useful tool to discover and address phase cancellation anomalies, but I wouldn't use them exclusively.

 

[Redacted]

Everything coming from multiple mic's is incredibly hard to do....
This is probably why there are so many (lauded) orchestral recordings that just grate with me - you however, sound like you have worked out how it's done, so hats off to you!