What I don’t get is this. With my monitors I’m hearing, for example, a left pan in both ears while with phones I only hear it in the left ear. From my perspective this alone “colors” the sound differently, i.e., a different soundstage than what I would hear through speakers.
Bud
Bud, the phones I use are open back design. That’s the type mentioned in the article that Joe posted the link to as well.
With them being open back you do actually hear the left pan in the right ear, etc. Not the same as you would with monitors mind you, but much more than you would with closed back phones (or ear buds).
So open back phones are the best for mixing, no good for recording through a microphone however, because you would get the bleed from the phones into the mic.
Open back vs closed back phones should make absolutely no difference on Pan perception or cross talk unless there is something wrong with the headphones or they don’t have similar frequency response specs. With open back phones you do get a sense of the room you are listening in from the lack of isolating aspect of open back phones. But the room sensation is from sound sources not originating at the phones themselves.
Sorry, you are mistaken. That is the entire point of the open back design.
Provide just one citation on the purpose of open back headphones allowing ear to ear bleed. Every credible reference on the difference of open vs closed back designs supports my position.
I prefer open backed earphones for mixing. For 15 years I used some of the finest electrostatic open back designs from Stax and Sennheiser as a sound quality engineer for General Motors.
After that, I worked as an engineer for Westone for 5 years. Westone invented in ear monitor earphones and had responsibility to run our earphones and headphones testing stations.
Your claim that the point of open back door in is to allow one to hear like stereo speaker playback, where bleed occurs that is audible in the opposite ear is the first I have ever heard such a claim.
You get room noise with open back. You get some bleed out of the back, but never enough to be heard in the opposite ear. Low frequency response sounds different. But it's not to be able to hear opposite ear output.
It is not my claim, I read it in the SOS article from the link Joe provided a few posts ago.
About half way down that article there is a greyed out section called “Choosing headphones for mixing”.
Read paragraph four where he talks about open back phones providing cross feed between the ears.
I see that there and SOS is typically a credible source. Doesn’t bear out with the physics of acoustics and the distance between the ears. I will see if Mr. Walker is still living and if he still makes that claim. HD650 are some of the best open back phones I’ve heard with dynamic drivers. I’ve wanted a set for years after I auditioned some at Grace Design (actually theirs were HD800’s I believe).
Edit: actually farther down in the article Martin addresses what is needed to simulate speaker playback with the discussions on cross feed software and circuitry.
The point of open back phones is not intentional cross feed of channels to emulate speaker playback.
Generally, I mix in the reverse order of cheap to good.
I start with the really cheap speakers first when I am doing the first mix.
I have a pair of very inexpensive Insignia flat panel speakers I got from Best Buy. I think they were $9.99.
Putting them close together I can simulate mono (sort of) and definitely simulate a 1965 Chrysler Bel-Air dashboard radio speaker.
I have found that if I mix on these FIRST then the song is going to sound pretty flippin’ great on just about everything, with a few minor tweaks.
It is kind of amazing to me how much time it saves. If you get it sounding good on those, when you put it on the good speakers, or the car, or the headphones or anything, you go "Oh yeah."
A few minor tweaks, but we are talking minutes not hours.
David Snyder Songwriter/Renaissance Man Studio + Fingers
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