I have a HD650, works fine, I have a friend who is dedicated to mastering, he had some Audeze, he tried some Newmann, he sold the Audeze and bought the HD20 & HD30. He is delighted.

 

VSX is super suck. Don't be fooled by their hype

 

I am very happy with my Sennheiser HD800's and HDV820 Amp. Also with my HD600 and aswell got the Divine pro5000 which for lows and mid lows is pretty awesome too, except the weird high end boost around 6-8K and maybe 6db or so hahahaha. But the HD800's is my reference and my Home Studio sound pretty similar after few years of acoustically treatments and tweaks to get this close with my Genelec full Range system. But i cant mix or Master on headphones at all, but mainly for check ups and Binaural Music or even Atmos...... Cheers and goodluck with your Choice................

 

There are lots of decent headphones out there.
Once they're burned in, and you've listened to a ton of different music on them to figure out their sound, you should be good to go regardless of your choice.

 

Take a note of all the shills in here trying to sell you Steven Slate headphones. Weirdos.

 

What about the 20 percent that are listening to your music in a club or in a bar? Or how about the audiophiles at home? Or other producers who want to use your music for reference? Aiming for the lowest common denominator just isn't a viable solution for professionals.

 

Look on the bright side, most original music is never heard by others, and if by accident you create something that is listenable, then it can always be mixed and mastered by experienced people with the right equipment at reasonable cost.

 

If you take a pride in your work, it should be mixed and mastered by experienced people with the right equipment before you release it. If you don't take any pride in how you present your work, why should anyone else bother to listen to it.

 

I don't know if this is worth anything but maybe it will help somebody and that's all I'm trying to do ..

I am a radio announcer that has been on the air for 27 years in commercial broadcast radio. No matter if it's Austin or Atlanta or L.A. or NYC .. no matter where I go .. the headphones that are sitting in the main studio that you are to monitor the air signal with are:

Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro

When you are on the air, you have several signal chains. The one you listen to when you go on the air, or mix your levels, or whatever you may be doing .. is .. the air signal. And I thought it was odd that no matter the radio station, they all had the exact same brand and the exact same model.

So, I'm, guessing that if you are looking to mix music that is the "Standard Commercial Mix for Broadcast & Retail" .. I would guess that it's a no-brainer:

Beyerdynamics DT 770 Pro

... I'm not really smart enough to tell you why. I can just convey to you the way it is. So, if you wish to argue about it, you win. You're smarter than me. I'm just a dumbass disc jockey. And this is something I noticed in my career.

I hope it helps somebody.

 

I'd be focussing on making the best demo possible before canvassing the opinions of others, and if the feedback was very favourable I would consider sending it out for mixing and mastering. I suppose it's all about quality control as you move from the original idea to the finished product.

 

Anyway, back to the original topic. I would try the Neumann NDH-30 for the bass presentation, and I think I will order some to use alongside my HD600.

Note: I have some small monitors (without a sub) to check transients, levels and instrument placing, etc.

 

Last edited: Dec 23, 2022

Loved your post! And don't worry I'm not going to argue with you because you are right!

The reason why you can see the DT 770 Pro in so many studios and broadcasting environments is that it's kind of adopted by the industry. And for good reason! It's about the best sounding, robust and reliable closed headphones you can buy for around $100. But they serve an entirely different purpose than the headphones that are used for mixing and analytic listening.

 

I didn't mean to say that we might as well all should start to mix in a concrete bunker because it doesn't matter anyway anymore because everyone listens to music on cheap earbuds anyway. What I meant to say is that that I think that the the hype of having a meticulously treated room with speaker systems of 10s of thousands of dollars is a past stage. You don't need an environment like that to produce a decent mix anymore. You just need reasonable quality gear and software that will enable you to make the transition to the various platforms.

Of course you need to make sure that a mix will sound good on a home system or in a club. But if you know how to make these transitions I believe this could be done on less expensive systems than the most top notch mastering engineers use.

And what does reference of sound quality in modern music today mean? It's not determined by the degree of high fidelity anymore! It's determined by the 'hype' of the season. How much distortion or saturation you can add? The art of singing has been degraded to the art of how much auto-tune you can apply! So what reference are you hoping to get out of this? Even if it was mastered in a top quality studio? Does it really matter anymore?

When it comes to the 'audiophile' business, were talking about a completely different market and world and entirely different from the music and entertainment business. I know this very well because I've been involved in this business for some years!

Most audiophiles don't listen to music like you and I do. In fact, I would even go so far as to state that a lot and even most of them are so consumed by the quest for perfection of sound that they don't even care about music. They just want to hear a perfect piano, a perfect violin or perfect orchestra in there room. Most of them can't enjoy music if the recording is flawed in their opinion. So the majority are not music lovers. They only love the equipment that makes their ultimate wet dream of reproduction of 'sound' come true.

I could tell you stories of homes of dedicated audiophiles I've been to! Rich people in mansions, with listening rooms with equipment and speaker you couldn't imagine. But also to relatively poor peoples homes in a one room apartments that had put all there efforts and hard earned money into their ultimate dream for perfect sound within their budget. But one thing always struck me about these people. They don't listen to music! They only use music as a means to hear how it sounds on their equipment.

So for normal mixing of music that will fit in clubs and homes you really don't have to worry about audiophiles. They are not interested in this stuff at all!

They might be in the next 384 khz/ 64 bit remix of the 'Dark side of the Moon' album cut on a primary vinyl matrix? To maybe hear that little bit of extra clarity in the bells? Or just to make sure what they've already expected.... that they need to replace their current $1500 interlink cable for an $8000 version to be able to capture that little bit of extra. You may think....but I'm really not exaggerating! That's how sick they can be!

 

Last edited: Dec 26, 2022

Yes it matters. A lot. Professional mastering studios exist for a reason and we still have plenty of clientele who take pride in their work and understand they are not a jack of all trades, and do not have the specialised equipment to do their work the justice it deserves.

If you cannot accurately hear the low end you just can't mix or master it properly. FFT's are just not accurate enough because the sample window must be long enough to measure wavelength. A sample window of 256 (for example) cannot accurately display any frequencies below 170Hz. To accurately measure the low frequencies, the window would refresh around 3 times per second and the changes in that time cannot be reflected accurately.

 

Talking about FFT's and displaying a sample rate of 256 of a frequency of 170hz on a scope is absolutely irrelevant to the discussion at hand! 170hz isn't even low end to begin with, but low mid range! So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here with this information? Maybe you are trying to say that in order to hear a frequency of 170hz you need at least about 1 meter of space at 20 degrees Celsius. Well, that is true for a sound that travels through open space but is totally false for earbuds and headphones. Please also look this up in your theory book on how this works and try not to confuse display of sound on a digital scope with the actual analogue world we live in and how the human ear perceives this!

Don't get me wrong! I'm not trying to proof that mastering engineers are a waste of space. They play an important part in how an end product sounds. And indeed if you take pride in your work you'd want it sound as good as possible on all media. So I'm not talking about acoustic music like singer songwriters, jazz trio's, opera or symphony orchestra's, where acoustic recording, mixing and mastering is involved! That's a totally different story!

I'm talking about music like EDM. I think it's a past stage to have to master your music in an environment that need to cost $100.000+. Most people's first and maybe even only exposure to a song or piece of music is through Spotify, Soundcloud or other platforms. These platforms heavily compresses music. By the time it reaches their ears on their cheap earbuds it's already gone through some serious changes. So I believe that any bedroom producer with good ears and today's tools and the right skills can produce a mix that can sound good on all platforms.

If you looked it up in your theory book you may also have discovered that something exists that is called 'psychoacoustics'. That plays a major role in how people perceive sound in general and explains why something like the current 'sub bass' hype is dominating music. And also how this 'real' sub base is actually 'fake' and irrelevant to any musical content of any piece of music that is played. It's just a trick that anyone can learn how to apply.

So yes, that's why we need expensive mastering engineers to create this 'psychoacoustic hoax' to our EDM track. So they are not totally useless after all.

And again, I'm NOT talking about recording, mixing and mastering of real acoustic instruments and real singers. I'm talking about EDM productions and productions where singers voices are saturated with auto-tune and vst instruments are bashed with compressors, maximizers and sidechaining!

Like I said. IMO any kid in the EDM scene with a laptop, decent gear, tools and headphones and a little knowledge of 'psychoacoutics', can create professional sounding tracks that will even sound good on festivals. No mastering engineer needed! But only if you've done your homework!

That's basically all I want to say in so many words! I needed more words because you don't seem to understand what the difference is between seeing a 170hz waveform of at 256 samples on a scope and actually hearing one in open space as opposed to hearing it on headphones or earbuds?

Please correct me if I misunderstood your intention or you think I'm wrong?

 

Last edited: Dec 26, 2022

K612 Pro + Sonarworks Reference + Subpac S2 is a combo I'm very happy with.

 

HEDD Audio Heddphones good to get second hand or refurbished

 

I would go for Sundara (still going to buy them at some point). I have LCD-X 2021 and they sound great. The thing with planar magnetics is they need a LOT of power to drive them nicely. I used to work with audio interface which has ~250mW of output. Then bought DAC-AMP ~1.5W. There is still not enough of Vpp to drive LCD-X's nicely with Fiio k5 ess. Definitely need balanced cable for planars with high output capabilities, otherwise the dynamics really suffer. Hell, even my old ass AKG k702 beats LCD-X on that amp in terms of dynamics and I don't mean that they are not there, but they sound lacking and not fully powered.

 

HD600'S owner and really love them, i would try Audeze and Sundara