PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production Headphone plugged into monitor output

Several things come to mind.

First... mixing on cans. The general school of thought is that you should mix on studio grade reference monitors and test on everything else including cans. The main reason being that cans, and all home stereo speakers have a coloration bias that will throw your mix off. However, if cans are all you have, certainly, go ahead and mix on them but understand their inherent bias. Most speakers and cans are designed to have a certain sound. Some boost the bass, others have a mid bump.... all to make the music sound like ear candy. If you are listening on a bass heavy biased source, you tend to have mixes with very little bass in them. Whatever the bias happens to be, your mix on that source will tend to go in the opposite direction. Folks mixing on a pair of inexpensive, tiny 3" monitors, tend to have too much bass in their mixes and so on.

If you go to a music store that has a studio pro-audio department, you can often A/B the various studio monitor brands side by side. I'm here to tell you that every single one of them sounds different from the ones setting next to it playing the same source music. It boils down to one thing. You have to find a pair of monitors you can afford, like how they look, and like how they sound. Then, you have to take them home, set them up and learn them inside and out in a musical way. Play commercially produced music through them so you can hear how they sound, and them start mixing through them and learn their characteristics so you are able to get a good, workable mix that translates well across most consumer systems.

Second, the reason there's a bit of..as you called it... sound degradation... is because there's an impedance mismatch with the cans connected. The output has an impedance designed for the input to a powered speaker's preamp section. The power transfer is less than efficient.

The simplest solution is not to add gizmos to the signal path but to use some sort of amp designed for cans. I used my old stereo receiver/amp as the monitor amp. I have an interface with 8 outputs on the back. I ran one of the pairs to the AUX input on the stereo system amp and used it to power the cans. I could also very easily use the stereo on speakers to "check the mix". If you have an old stereo system laying around collecting dust or one that you use that has an unused AUX IN on it, try that. Shut off the speakers and see how that works.

A bit later, I actually purchased a 4 output headphone amp to use instead of the stereo since the stereo only allowed one headphone set at a time and no way to control volume on the individual ones if I used a "Y-cord" as a cheater.