Quality Budget Gear Ep. 04: Headphones

There’s a few different types of headphone design, and each has a slightly different purpose in the music studio. Which you choose (and where you can save $) depends on the specific application.

Closed-back headphones

Very common to see, these have a sealed cup that fully encloses your ear. The enclosed cup means this style of headphone minimizes bleed noise, and so are often used when recording your tracks. If you’re an artist, you might have worn these when doing your vocals.

They’re also easy to mass produce, so that makes them cheaper.

If you’re recording at home, you should have at least one pair of closed-back style headphones, and you don’t have to spend a lot: $50-100 is fine.

Just use these primarily for recording your tracks, and not as much in mixing, post production, or critical listening. I like Audio Technica’s versions, personally.

The enclosed cup design has some drawbacks: they don’t sound as natural, and can be very inaccurate acoustically. They act as a sonic magnifying glass, overemphasizing details that will lead you astray if you’re trying to evaluate audio on them.

Mixes done exclusively on closed-back headphones often overuse reverb and compression, because that’s what sounds good on these style of headphones. This means it’s easy to make a mix that sounds good on your one set of cans, but falls apart everywhere else. Also, you really can’t trust the bass that you’re hearing on most closed-back headphones.

As a mixer, with practice, you can learn to adjust to mixing on one set of closed-back headphones, if you really want to. But it will take a very long time, involve lots of frustrating trial and error, and you will max out at about 80% of professional quality in the end, after spending all of that time. I never recommend mixing exclusively on headphones; I always recommend using both headphones and speakers in combination.

Open-back headphones

This headphone design has drivers that sit on top of your ear and are not enclosed by a cup.

Because of this, they can sound much more natural. Because the air around the drivers isn’t enclosed and resonating in weird ways, they can also be more accurate. This design is often chosen in a hifi listening setting, and can be useful in music production tasks like mixing and mastering.

This design does have some drawbacks. The open air drivers mean that sound bleeding from the headphones and into your microphone will be a concern, if you try to record tracks with this style of can. And, the lack of isolation goes both ways: a nice quiet listening environment will be needed to get the most out of this design.

Open-closed back headphones

This is a hybrid design that attempts to achieve the best of both worlds: sufficient isolation for detail, without a full seal around the ears to improve acoustic accuracy.

One of my favorite pairs of reference headphones, the Sennheiser HD 600, is an example of this design. Drawbacks: these are harder to find, and often more expensive when you do. And, they still exhibit too much bleed for many common recording tasks.

Budget considerations

Save money on headphones by thinking of your use case first, and then buying appropriately.

If you’re just doing basic demos at home, you don’t need anything crazy to make simple recordings.

But, don’t also expect to get professional results out of that same gear-you will need to spend more for increased accuracy if attempting professional quality work in a home setting is your goal.

Every headphone, no matter how expensive, is like wearing colored glasses. You won’t get all the honest information you need to make a good recording, particularly when it comes to bass response, stereo imaging, and compression. That’s why I always recommending moving between headphones and speakers during music production: use both, not one or the other.