Studio headphones

Any professional audio engineer will tell you that there is a huge difference between studio headphones (also known as studio monitors) and your normal headphones. If you are a home studio user, you might be tempted to use your daily headphones while mixing and recording, but we don’t recommend it for a number of reasons. Most importantly, your normal headphones will not give you the same high definition playback that studio headphones will, so you won’t be able to hone in on the nuanced detail of your tracks. That means that there is a good chance that your listeners will hear your track in higher detail than you do, if their headphones are better than yours. Studio headphones mean that you have ultimate control over your output and will never find any nasty surprises in your final master. When headphones first came out in the 1940’s they were mainly used by telephone operators and the occasional radio disc jockey. As technology advanced, so to did the specificity of headphones and what each type is used for. These days there are two main categories that headphones are divided into: ‘circum-aural’ and ‘supra-aural.’ Circum-aural headphones are those that completely enclose the ear, while supra-aural headphones sit on the surface of the ear. Studio headphones are almost always circum-aural in design because they provide much better isolation of sound. The normal headphones that you use for your daily commute to listen to podcasts and music are likely supra-aural by design. These work fine for regular tasks, but are not designed for the attention to detail that studio work requires. Do also check out our best headphones reviews.