Mixing on headphones - interesting discussion, Andrew Scheps

SupremeFist said:

Ok, I've definitely heard suboptimally set limiters doing that to piano notes. Post an excerpt though? I'm curious.

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So this was a 1h effort to figure this out where to cut a piece, where I had it located, and what (the hell) was Soundcloud password etc, bcs I didnt want to hijack this thread with a full track and link. Do you have some postbox or something where I can send you a bill? (Let's make it £29.99, forget about the VAT).

The clipping sound (I cut out one example) is at 3.5 sec. I got earplugs now only (on the road), but I didnt hear that clip before.

PeterN said:

The clipping sound (I cut out one example) is at 3.5 sec. I got earplugs now only (on the road), but I didnt hear that clip before.

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Super obvious with my NDH30. Not so obvious with my T50RP but still very audible.

Would have been great it you had uploaded the .wav or even the .mp3 to see the waveform.

Pier said:

Super obvious with my NDH30. Not so obvious with my T50RP but still very audible.

Would have been great it you had uploaded the .wav or even the .mp3 to see the waveform.

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OK. Well, this was not the best example as I had to bounce again etc. I might even have twisted it out of context now as I made new examples. (I leave it here as this is hijacking thread now, thanks for reply - appreciated)

@SupremeFist the billing was a joke (I just played it up a bit) all cool with your question

PeterN said:

OK. Well, this was not the best example as I had to bounce again etc. I might even have twisted it out of context now as I made new examples. (I leave it here as this is hijacking thread now, thanks for reply - appreciated)

@SupremeFist the billing was a joke (I just played it up a bit) all cool with your question

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Yep, I hear it on Ollo S4!

SupremeFist said:

Yep, I hear it on Ollo S4!

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btw I tried Presonus HD-9 headphones and MacBook Air speakers now, and it definitely does not show up in them. (yeah, both are low quality - if quality at all - for audio analysing, of course, but that's what I got on me when on the road). So maybe that example was not completely in vain. Not sure why the Sennheiser 660s didnt pick it up. Or, my dear AKG Q701 Quincy Jones (which are the favourites).

I've been monitoring, mixing and mastering most of my stuff on the road on IEMs (Shure, Etymotic, IMR, Meze Audio) and sometimes cans (AKG K712 Pro) all modded to some extent, via different USB DACs since 2004 ... no regrets. More importantly I make good use of reference tracks and wouldn't want to mix/master anything without them. YMMV.

chopin4525 said:

Best take of the video: "Headphones are a magnifier for s***"!"

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Especially, when using headphones with a superb resolution.

For this case I use a Beyerdynamic T90, which lets me hear things, I don't hear with speakers or my cheap Beyer DT-990 or my Apple AirPods Max.

But the other two have their own advantage. The DT-990 have a peak at 11 kHz, so that I hear at once, when the high end has issues. And the AirPods Max have a huge bass response to show up issues in the low end. And the APM are absolutely superb for Dolby Atmos binaural mixing.

I use speakers only to finalize the mix to make sure, it sounds great everywhere ... especially on my HiFi, in the car and my iPhone

Haven't watched the video but I think mixing on headphones is perfectly possible and allows you to focus very well on certain details. I'd say the most important thing is that you know your headphones very well, how they translate to your speakers and that you don't mix exclusively on headphones for too long.
"Ear fatigue" is real. Switching to speakers immediately after mixing on headphones for a long time is very confusing, so I'd always take a serious break first. After that maybe listen on speakers for a while to hear if you were doing well on headphones. If that's the case, you can easily continue on headphones and perhaps repeat this check again later.

The latest version of Realphones is pretty good by the way and received positive feedback on Gearspace. It has a new "reference monitoring" setting which combined with a 50% correction curve on my Sennheiser headphones seems to be working really well for me. Realphones also has very nice room and speaker simulations to do some quick checks.

TheMysterium said:

I'd say the most important thing is that you know your headphones very well, ...

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Absolutely, but that also applies to speakers, IMO.

TheMysterium said:

The latest version of Realphones is pretty good by the way ...

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I would never use it for above reason ... then the headphones would no longer sound as I got used to

I prefer mixing on the headphones, I got used to, and then checking the mix on different speakers afterwards, starting with my preferred speakers, the ones I got used to.