How to Mix on Headphones

Mixing on headphones stopped being a compromise, and the reason is not that headphones improved. It is that most home listening rooms were always worse than anyone admitted. A small untreated room can swing 15 dB or more at low frequencies across the space of a chair, and no headphone introduces an error remotely that large. Removing the room is a real gain, not a consolation.

What you give up is specific and worth naming up front, because a page that does not name it is selling something. Headphones deliver each channel to one ear with no crossfeed, so the stereo image is unnaturally wide, and they deliver no low frequency energy to your body, so bass decisions lose the physical component you would normally use. Both are correctable. Neither goes away by buying more expensive headphones.

What do headphones get right that a small room gets wrong?

Three things, and they are the three that ruin most home mixes.

• No modal cancellation. A rectangular room concentrates energy at frequencies set by its dimensions. A 12 ft dimension produces an axial mode at 47.1 Hz and harmonics above it, and at certain positions those modes cancel rather than reinforce. Sit in a null and the room subtracts bass you then add back, until there is far too much of it everywhere else. Headphones have no modes at all.
• No early reflections. A reflection arriving within a few milliseconds of the direct sound comb filters it, which smears the stereo image and puts notches in the response that move when your head moves. Headphones have none of this.
• No variation. A treated room is still a different room from the mastering engineer's room. Your headphones sound identical in a hotel, at a kitchen table and on a plane, which means the reference you build up transfers with you.

Run your own dimensions through the room mode calculator before deciding your room is fine. The figures are usually worse than people expect, and they are the honest reason headphone mixing is now taken seriously.

What do headphones get wrong?

Two things, and the first one is the one people underestimate.

The stereo image is wrong by construction. On speakers, sound from the left speaker reaches your right ear about 0.6 ms later and filtered by the shape of your head. That delay and filtering is called crossfeed, and your brain uses it to build a soundstage that appears in front of you. Headphones deliver the left channel to the left ear only, so the cues your brain expects are absent. The perceptual result is a stage that wraps around the inside of your skull, with hard-panned elements feeling detached and the centre feeling narrower than it is.

The practical consequence is that panning decisions made on headphones tend to be too wide. What sounds pleasantly spacious on headphones can sound hollow on speakers, where the same elements now overlap.

You lose the physical component of bass. Below about 100 Hz a lot of your judgement on speakers comes from the chest and the room, not from the ears. Headphones deliver the frequency and not the sensation, and this is why headphone mixes tend to come out either slightly bass-shy, because it never feels like enough, or bass-heavy, because a driver an inch from the eardrum can produce a lot of level without much effort.

How do you correct for the width problem?

Three habits, all free.

1. Check mono, often. Sum the mix to mono and listen for elements that vanish or thin out. Anything that disappears has a phase relationship that will also cause it problems on a phone speaker, a laptop, or a club system. Mono checking is the single highest value habit in headphone mixing and it takes one button.
2. Pan more conservatively than feels right. If a guitar sounds correct at 100 percent left on headphones, it is probably correct at about 70 on speakers. Wide panning is not wrong, but the amount that sounds good in a headphone image is reliably more than the amount that sounds good in a room.
3. Trust the meter on the width plugin, not the feeling. Stereo wideners and mid-side processing feel enormous on headphones because they exaggerate exactly the cue headphones already exaggerate. If you cannot hear the effect on speakers, it is not there.

Crossfeed plugins exist and do help, since they reintroduce a small delayed and filtered amount of each channel into the opposite ear. They make headphones feel more like speakers and less fatiguing. They also change what you hear, so pick one and keep it, rather than switching, since the value of any monitoring path is that you learn it.

How do you judge bass without a room?

By replacing feel with three checks. This is the part of the workflow that actually decides whether a headphone mix translates.

1. Look at a spectrum analyser. Not to mix by, but to catch the two failures headphones hide: inaudible sub energy below 30 Hz eating headroom, and a bass region that is simply absent because the headphones flattered it.
2. Reference two tracks you know intimately. Level matched, in the same session, through the same headphones. Your memory of how a record sounds is a far better instrument than your memory of how bass should feel.
3. Check on something small. A phone speaker reproduces almost nothing below about 400 Hz, so if the bass line still reads there, the harmonic content is doing its job and the mix will survive a laptop and a car.

Which headphones should you actually mix on?

Open back, and the specific model matters less than owning one pair long enough to learn it. Every pair has a response curve you have to internalise, and switching pairs every year means starting that process over.

The Beyerdynamic DT 990 PRO at $159.99 is the value answer, with the caveat that the 250 ohm version genuinely needs a headphone amplifier to reach a usable level from most interfaces. The Sennheiser HD 600 at $268.90 is the reference: nothing exciting happens on them, which is exactly the point, since a pair that flatters your mix teaches you nothing. For tracking you still want closed back isolation like the DT 770 PRO , and the open back versus closed back comparison covers why one pair cannot do both jobs well.

Full picks are in the mixing headphone roundup, and the tracking side is in best headphones for tracking.

Does a headphone amplifier matter?

Only when impedance says it does, and then it matters a great deal. Impedance determines how much voltage the amplifier must produce to deliver a given level, and an output that cannot supply it does not simply sound quiet: it sounds thin, because the amplifier's output impedance starts interacting with the driver's impedance curve, which varies with frequency.

This is the most common misdiagnosis in headphone buying. A 250 ohm pair on a weak output sounds lifeless and gets returned, when the actual fault is at the amplifier stage. The signal flow guide covers where that stage sits, and the interface guide covers how to read the specification before you buy.

What is the workflow that makes a headphone mix translate?

In order, and the order is the point. Each step catches a different class of error.

1. Balance and arrangement on headphones at a moderate level. This is where headphones are genuinely better than a small room, because detail and depth are unobscured.
2. Mono check at every major decision. Not once at the end. Phase problems introduced at minute ten are much cheaper to fix at minute eleven.
3. Reference against two known tracks, level matched. Loudness bias is real and a louder mix always sounds better.
4. Spectrum check for sub energy below about 30 Hz, which you cannot hear well and which eats headroom in mastering.
5. Play it on a phone speaker. Thirty seconds, and it catches arrangement problems nothing else catches.
6. Play it in a car. Still the most valuable second reference most people have access to, because it is a room you know intimately.
7. Take an hour off before the final loudness decision. Fatigue on headphones is quieter and faster than fatigue on monitors.

If you do own monitors , the right division of labour is not headphones or speakers. It is detail work on headphones, and low end and loudness calls on monitors in a room that has had its corners handled. The room treatment guide and monitor positioning guide cover getting that second reference to a state where it is worth trusting.

Related

• Best studio headphones for mixing: the picks, by tier
• Open back versus closed back: why one pair cannot do both jobs
• Monitors versus headphones: which reference to trust for which decision
• Room mode calculator: what your room is doing that headphones are not
• How to position studio monitors: for the checks headphones cannot make