TheDewd said:
This is what I've been trying to tell this board for a while now, but nobody wants to hear it.
Have you ever considerd that you problem may not be so much your message as your delivery?
Have you ever wondered why an intrinsically bright person such as yourself has maxed out on red chicklets, and that it might not be because you are right and the entire rest of the world is wrong, but rather that you are just doing a poor job of representing what you are actually trying to say?
I've been reading your stuff for weeks now; you and I even got into it pretty heavy over this subject a while back. This is the very first time you have conceded that headphones may not be the way to go for the entire mix process; until now you have gotten very defensive very early on in any such debate, causing you to to take a wounded animal position that headphones are the shit and nearfields are not, with no room for maneuvering. Now maybe that's not what you meant, but it's sure how it reads to everybody else.
I'm going to repeat to everybody in general what I said the last time (and others have said as well): When talking about this subject, it's a mistake to generalize "mixing" as one single global procedure in one single global situation. When I mix, I'm switching between monitors and headphones all the time. Headphones are great for aurally zooming in on low-level details in the track or the mix, for basic analysis of track panning, stuff like that. But when push comes to shove, mix balance in the spectral dimenstion and final 3D mix tweaking should be judged in real space through a real coupling of monitor and environment.
Can it be done even more extensively in headphones like Dewd does? Sure, if one needs to; the human body is capable of almost anything. Ray Charles was frigin BLIND yeat he had no trouble playing master engineer and producer in fully-racked 48 track studios, often with nobody needing to push buttons for him. Beethoven was DEAF and still played piano and manufactured some of the greatest musical compositions in history. Compared to those, mixing 100% in headphones is a walk in the park, if one learns how to do it properly. But for 99% us, *choosing not to use monitors at all* is a self-imposed handicap that is harder to learn and yields no advantage over choosing the right tool for the right job at the right time, whether it's monitors, headphones or a Campbell's Tomato Soup can.
Dewd, pull back on your defensiveness. When people take a "my way or highway" approach to their anti-headphones opinion, you're falling into a trap by responding in kind. In any point/counterpoint argument that's so completly polarized like that, the minority opinion invariably loses.
G.