Using Headphones Versus Using Studio Monitors In Your Audio Mixing and Audio Mastering

The use of headphones vs. the use of studio monitors in audio mixing is one of the most debated subjects amongst engineers of all skill levels and career paths.

Some would argue that, while studio monitors may give you a more "accurate" representation of the sound and the phase of the recording, that because small headphones are now one of the most popular ways to listen to music, greater attention must be paid to optimizing your audio masters towards that clientele.

Others would say that you can't give as much credit to earbuds and such when it comes to mixing, because then that would destroy the integrity of the mix for anyone else who wants to listen to it on another medium.

For purposes of this mixing article, I am going to keep this to a more scientific approach, and hopefully stay out of the social debate as much as possible.

And as far as the science of sound is concerned, there are clear differences to when you should be using headphones vs. studio monitors: namely, headphones should be used for anything to do with sonic imagery, and studio monitors should be used for anything to do with relative volume.

For anything related to imagery, I tend to trust my headphones (Ultrasone Pro 900- which I HIGHLY recommend) before the monitors, mainly because of the fact that a lot of the "imagery" processing is done specifically for those listening with that medium.

Closed-back headphones can also make it easier to hear the exact decay in the reverb, and the width of the spread, which are two key factors in producing a realistic-sounding mix.

Types of imagery processing include reverb, stereo spread, panning and binaural post-processing.

For anything concerning relative volume, I have found through much testing that studio monitors (I use KRK Rokit 6's) are almost always to be trusted before headphones, and for several reasons:

First, the EQ in headphones does not always behave in a consistent and predictable manner (and keep in mind that EQ is the relative volume of different parts of the frequency spectrum), and there is no such thing as headphones with an absolutely flat frequency response, anyway.

Second, studio monitors give you the ability to hear subtle volume changes that most people cannot perceive with headphones.

Third, and most important, you cannot perceive phase cancellations in headphones the same as you can with monitors- and these will affect not only the overall quality of the recording, but the perceived volume of tracks as well (something with audible phasing will sound "thinner", and, therefore, quieter).

Relative volume processing includes compression, EQ, any type of filtering (hipass, lowpass, bandpass, etc.), and, of course, the volume faders. Using monitors for these functions will ensure more accurate mixes which will behave better on different playback devices.

Headphones and Studio Monitors both have their place in the audio mixing and audio mastering realm (which, on a side-note, don't always need to be viewed as separate processes). If you want to produce great recordings, then I would recommend having a quality set of both.

When you are working with audio, you should always check the one against the other, just so that your ears can grow and become more used to how the EQ behaves in your headphones, and how the reverb sounds in the monitors, but I recommend that you trust your monitors for volume (including EQ), and trust your headphones for imagery.

For any other types of processing (such as applying a noise gate to the drums, or a delay effect), you should test them on both the headphones and monitors, and ultimately you will have to decide how you want these effects to be perceived in a given listening medium, and mix from there.

I hope you've found this article useful. If you have, feel free to leave feedback and check out some of my other music articles.