Re: Advice on sound monitoring with headphones

"tmarc" <tmarciniak@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1190046274.965161.323890@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Sep 17, 5:58 pm, "Patrick Keenan" <t...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'd like to ask you for an advice on equipment needed to monitor
band's sound while playing/recording.
A little more info is helpful -
Is this for the entire band? On stage as well as studio?

Thanks for replies.

The equipment should be for entire band. We have nothing except simple
speakers right now, but we wanted a hint for future so we could plan
spending our money. A few years ago a small band I've played with had
"big" (i.e. 100W) speakers facing public, and small (15-30W) for
monitoring facing the players. I see that today's bands use headphones
for this purpose. This seems to be really good idea for both recording
and stage. Since I don't have much experience in this field I don't
know what to look for - our band is "just for pleasure of playing",
nothing serious right now but who knows. I imagine that it's easy to
connect ordinary headphones to outputs of mixer but maybe there are
better solutions? I've checked a few online shops with audio gear but
nothing pops up.

Do I understand correctly - this is not to monitor what will be recorded but
to each player's playing better?

Anyway, if you need several phones at once, a mixer won't do. What you need
is a headphone amp with several outputs.
A mixer will typically have one headphone output and other outputs are
low-level i.e. won't drive phones. That way you can spread the entire mix
for players when playing. But everyone will hear the same mix.

On stage you'd like a little less visible system, earphones and wireless
transmitters - handy but costly. Those would be driven from a separate
monitor mixer and have onboard amps each...so you'll need a monitor mixer
and a snake to the mainboard monitor out channels. Costly and complex. But
you would be able to adjust each earphone separately i.e. what they hear. If
the need is only for a few earphones, no separate monitor mixer is necessary
if the mainboard has sufficient AUX busses or other assignable buses to send
separate signals to monitor earphones.

For mixing, as stated, headphones are definitely not the best choice but
unless you have dough to spend on real quality monitor speakers, headphones
will give much better audio at much lower cost for such purposes.

Someone said mid-level speakers are fine as most people listen to such
speakers - true, but mixing with those is damn hard because they simply
don't let you hear some frequencies which might then be very very annoying
in certain systems.

Monitor speakers aren't supposed to 'sound good' they are supposed to reveal
each and every fault in the mix, and as such they need a very flat response
and very high separation and clarity. So if you use midlevel speakers to
make mixes, please do supplement that with earpones as well, as in that case
they will be extremely valuable tools in finding out oif there's extreme
bass at some freq or whatever. A spectrum analyser also helps.

Most engineers have a pair of earphones such as AKG K250 or something at
hand at all times, and while they do most of the mixing on, say, huge
Genelec Triamps or so, they'll also use decidedly mid-range Yamaha N120's or
similar a lot too AND also check the balances etc. with headphones also.

Me, for reasons beyond my control, I've always only used headphones for
mixing. Wish I could get some nice Genelecs or at least some Behringer
Truths or similar.

Cheers,

Dee


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