ATTN: FANU-san

[Macc]

Proximity and isolation - in using headphones, both your sense of stereo imaging and frequency response change... imaging is exaggerated due to the isolation of one ear from the other, and frequency response gets skewed in the bass and mid-range areas due to the proximity of the drivers to the ear. So you can't be sure of the relative levels of frequencies in that area of the spectrum.

Unless you get lots of practice.

"But wait.... so what if the response is different for each person, why is that any different from monitors?"
Good question - there is a huge difference.... the "personalized-response" effect is much more pronounced with headphones due to the proximity of the cones to a person's ears. With monitors, the room acts as a frequency-response leveler, giving a more uniform response to each person hearing them, but with headphones, it's virtually direct contact between ears and the cones, there's no room effect to "level-out" the response.

How vague can you be?

Is he saying that the room can minimise/reduce individual people's perception of the sound? How does that work then? The room actually affects your ear's response and how your brain perceives it, making it more like everyone else's? What a load of bollocks! I'd be willing to listen to any argument that can actually describe exactly why that is.


And besides all that, I'm not exactly passing my headphones round to lots of people, am I. I put them on, I take them off later. I know how they correlate with the 'real world', and with other people's stuff. And that's all that matters here really. If I NEVER listened to my mixes on anything other than my headphones, I could be making shit mixes when I thought they were great - but then that applies equally to monitors.

This article doesn't really convince me at all to be honest.