Best Home Studio Headphones

Your favorite

  • AKG K240 Studio Headphones

    Votes: 1 11.1%

  • KRK KNS 6400 or 8400

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • AKG K 240 MKII

    Votes: 1 11.1%

  • Audio-Technica ATH-M50S

    Votes: 2 22.2%

  • AKG K271 MKII

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • None of the above

    Votes: 1 11.1%

  • You shouldn't even be contemplating mixing on headphones sonny...

    Votes: 4 44.4%
  • Total voters
    9
  • Poll closed .
A

Atmarama

New member
Hey guys, looking into buying some decent headphones for listening and mixing... Im a singer/songwriter with a wide music taste from Beatles and Dylan to Sigur Ros. I'm slowly building up a small home studio... I have a set of cheap Sennheiser 202's for tracking purposes, so I'm looking for something a better and more versatile. I seem to be most attracted to the AKG 240's, may be the price though!

These are my options so far, and your advice would be much appreciated. Being in South Africa we don't have a huge selection to choose from so I have to buy off ebay and pay extra shipping costs...



AKG K 240 S
$99.00
+ $19.99
shipping


KRK KNS6400
$99.99
+ $35.00
shipping


AKG K 240 MKII
$139.00
+ $20.00
shipping

Audio-Technica ATH-M50S
$159.02
Free
shipping


AKG K271 MKII
$142.98
+ $17.90
shipping


AKG K 240 mkII
$129.00
+ $45.25
shipping


KRK KNS-8400
$149.00
+ $46.25
shipping
 
Your mainly going to want a pair on monitors to use instead of headphones, especially for mixing.
For just listening to music, headphones are fine though. Headphones can be used for mixing, but you still would want a pair of monitors.
I'll let someone else clear this up for you a bit more..
 
Good headphones are better than cheap monitors.

For editing and mixing, open-back are best - the good ones are the Sennheiser HD 600 & HD 650 and the AKG K271 (the very best are the Sennheiser HD 800, but those are £1,000).

For tracking, closed are best as they won't bleed back into the microphone - so the Sennheiser HD 215 are good or the two KRK headphones. The Sennheiser HD 25-1 are superb location recording headphones.

I hope this helps.
 
John Willett said:
Good headphones are better than cheap monitors.
Click to expand...

I disagree. That MIGHT be true if you spent $1000 on the best headphones in the world, and $100 on the shittiest "monitors". In which case your $1000 would be 100x better spent on a pair of HR824's and a pair of K240 Studios (my pick on the list!). I think even some krk 6's or behry truths would give you better results that some super high-end headphones.
 
I check my mixes with Sennheiser HD 280's they run $99

they have great clarity

but don't expect to get a great mix from any headphones -
 
suprstar said:
I disagree. That MIGHT be true if you spent $1000 on the best headphones in the world, and $100 on the shittiest "monitors". In which case your $1000 would be 100x better spent on a pair of HR824's and a pair of K240 Studios (my pick on the list!).
Click to expand...

Quality for quality, to get monitors of the same quality as headphones you have to pay about ten times the price.

Yes, ideally you need both and you really *do* need decent monitors - but then you also need a decent room as well.

Headphones can actually tell you a lot - in many ways they tell you more than monitors - when I really need to listen to detail, I use headphones rather than monitors.

As music is often nowadays listened to through headphones via an iPod or the like - monitoring on headphones is pretty essential really.

When I started, many years ago, I used headphones exclusively for the first couple of years until I could afford some semi-decent monitors.


suprstar said:
I think even some krk 6's or behry truths would give you better results that some super high-end headphones.
Click to expand...

I think not.
 
Folks thanks for the responses! I'm still keen to hear more opinions though. Budget strapped as I am presently I am mostly interested in opinions of the headphones for now (monitors are still a little way off in my budget book) - but to this point I've made some pretty decent demos with just the cheap sennheiser 202's...

Really good to have the homerecording.com resources available. As with most things subjective there will always be differing opinions, which is another reason why this forum is so great!

Much appreciated! And I'm sure you'll be hearing more from me soon...
 
Bro, just pick a pair that you guess will be comfortable and cause the least listener fatigue while you spend HOURS learning their sound. ;) . Then mix.

Think about cost of replacement as well.
 
CFox said:
Bro, just pick a pair that you guess will be comfortable and cause the least listener fatigue while you spend HOURS learning their sound. ;) . Then mix.

Think about cost of replacement as well.
Click to expand...

Ye thats another reason why the AKG 240's are calling.....
 
suprstar said:
I disagree. That MIGHT be true if you spent $1000 on the best headphones in the world, and $100 on the shittiest "monitors". In which case your $1000 would be 100x better spent on a pair of HR824's and a pair of K240 Studios (my pick on the list!). I think even some krk 6's or behry truths would give you better results that some super high-end headphones.
Click to expand...

I dunno....I love my KRK 6's and all, but honestly having heard both, I think I'd take a nice pair of cans such as the Sennheiser HD 650s if it came down to it.
 
Hi Atmarama

Getting opinions here has some value but I would be looking at reviews on the shortlisted headphones. If you can get past the diehards who say you can't mix with headphones, given your financial situation, you could do a lot worse. I use headphones sometimes just to get a different angle on the sound that I have produced. As John Willet says, you can sometimes pick up something in the headphones that you didn't catch on the monitors. That has happened to me more than once and I always give the phones a go whenever I have finished mastering. Sometimes during mixing.

The thing to note is that even if you go and purchase your final choice of headphones, they may not sound as great as you expected because of something called "burn-in" which means that the headphones have to be used for a few days or weeks before you get a good sound from them. I don't know the science behind that but I know that some of the phones I have used did in fact sound better after some use. I suspected it was due to my getting used to them but apparently it is a fact of headphones.

Good luck with your selection
 
As long as you have nice quality headphones that are balanced on lo, mid and hi you should be good.

You don't want ones with really high bass for the mastering purposes
 
Headphones have two disadvantages for mixing. One is they will lie about transients, especially at high volumes. The driver is too close to your head and doesn't move any actual air like a speaker does. Of course, If you haven't bothered to give your room proper treatment headphones will seem to tell you more because your room is bad. Two is they present a very artificial stereo image. Find a section of music that has an instrument dead panned to one side and you will feel the uncomfortable and unnatural feeling I am talking about. Nowhere in a sound space will there ever be such an inflated stereo image than with headphones. They can also lie about phase issues because the drivers aren't sharing any space between them because your head is in the way.

A good set of cans are very necessary though. I find them extremely useful for listening to subtle reverbs and other effects where just a touch is needed. Also, clean vocal tracks are near impossible without them, obviously. But you can't trust them for giving you an accurate picture of instrument balance, especially percussion. I often find mixes done on headphones to be scooped and the drums to be too loud in the mix because of this.

At the end of the day, if you want to make any serious recordings, you have to have both a good set of monitors and a good set of headphones.
 
Thanks for the input folks! I've gone ahead and ordered the AKG K240's :) I've been working with cheapo sennheisers up to this point and my mixes really haven't come out bad so it can only get better right!

Thanks again guys!
A
 
I notice that they are semi-open which means there would be a lot of leakage if you are recording vocals with them. They may sound great which is your main criterion but remember the semi-open bit when recording
 
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