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Ebay mark7777_1
My helix is nevertheless a lot better.
Good headphones helps, but above £50 and diminishing returns and / or studio spec issues come into it
I’m so bored I might as well be listening to Pink Floyd
To get the best out of your MFX via headphones, you really need studio monitoring headphones. Two of the most popular at a reasonable & similar price are the Audio Technica ATH m50x (these are mine) and the Beyerdynamic 770 Pro (80 ohm). Studio monitoring headphones have a wider frequency response and are 'sort of' like 'FRFR' powered speakers (Full Range Flat Response)
Also, older MFX units and even amps typically won't sound as good through headphones as modern MFX simply because headphone quality never used to be a 'biggie' and the headphone 'circuit' often weren't particularly good. e.g. my Vox Tonelabs SE (2004) and LE (2007) sound 'OK' through headphones, & ditto with my Vox Valvetronix AD120VTX (2004), but through my Line 6 Pod Go the m50x sound brilliant.
Better than many newer units I've used.
What you are looking for is something that doesn't sound fatiguing and often that can mean not a flat studio response but something a little softer in the upper mids.
The devices headphone output makes a difference too. Some are fine at driving high impedance cans cleanly although might struggle for voltage level if you like it loud but will sound harsh driving into low Z cans as they need more current. Some have a class D headphone output which drive most things well enough but it's more digital shit on top of something that's already digital.
Always look in charity shops for headphones. I once scored a £120 pair of Sony cans for £2.50 ... people don't know the difference in what these things are worth and some of the older designs are lovely to use for guitar practice.
the pickup and headphones are the two transducers in the music reproduction chain, why skimp on them?
Ebay mark7777_1
In terms of speakers we had 4 sets. Large Sanyo floor mounted for tracking because they weren't fatiguing over long tracking sessions. Goodmans 1C100 and Yamaha NS10's for general mixing and HK computer speakers for checking mixes on laptops.
There's often a general belief that the expensive stuff is always the best stuff for the job but in reality anything acoustic and mechanical, like a microphone, speaker, set of headphones etc will tend to excel at some applications but not all.
Always be guided by your ears is my motto and accept your age. A person of 45 or older doesn't have the ears of a 25 year old. Not only does your frequency response fall away from a theoretical 2020 you also hear mid frequencies slightly different, some will be more harsh and jarring to the older listener.
Headphone amps are indeed another area where things can fall down. I know a bit about this because I've designed a lot of them over the years for my various IEM devices I've made and sold. To a lot of manufactures the headphone output is an afterthought and they will often use a simple opamp circuit which just isn't capable of driving cleanly into low Z cans. Many cheap mixing desks, multi headphone amps will have just that. Normally the same opamp they have used everywhere else in the device because it keeps the BOM simple. You can normally improve on this by using a standalone headphone amp between the device and the cans. Some people might think what's the point of that, the audio still goes through the bad headphone amp ... however now that cheap opamp headphone amp isn't loaded by the cans. It's feeding into a far higher impedance which it can drive cleanly.
So your headphone experience depends on a lot of factors really. There's no device that will sound excellent to everyone on every device in the same way there's no microphone that excels at everything. Which makes sense because headphones are microphones used in a reversed direction.
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