this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
9 points (100.0% liked)

Music Production

72 readers
1 users here now

This is Music Production. A place to share anything and everything you want about your music making journey! Learning is the goal, so discussion is encouraged!

We have a mirror community at [email protected] !

It's a general instance, and it will provide us with better redundancy in case of outages and hiatuses! Everything I post will pop up on both, and you can cross-post your submissions to the other instance if you like!

Rules are as follows:

  1. Don't share other people's music without commentary, analysis or questions. This is not a music discovery community.
  2. No elitism or bigotry towards other people's music tastes. Be polite in disagreement.

I will update rules as necessary, but I promise we'll stay light on them and only add new ones after discussion!

Here are some useful examples of what a great post would be about:

(in no particular order)

  1. Stuff you made/are making. Get valuable feedback and criticism!
  2. Learning resources - videos, articles, posts on any topic concerning a production process, be it composition, sound design, sampling, mixing, mastering, DAW workflow or any other.
  3. Free plugins, presets and samplepacks. Giveaways and self-made stuff included!
  4. News about production software, releases and personalities.
  5. Questions and general advice about music production.
  6. Essays on your favorite productions. Inspirations and insights!
  7. Your physical analog gear! Let us know how it performs!

Good to know: As a general word of caution, avoid posting complete compositions, mixes and tracks on the internet before backing them up on a remote and reputable server. Even small snippets or watermarked tracks should be posted AFTER backing it up to cloud. Timestamps from cloud services will help you in case of theft. And, as a public resource, lemmy is not a safe place to post your unpublished work, so please make sure your work is protected.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

For a set of headphones that is so extremely visible online and offers quite a unique feature, I couldn’t find much information on it that wasn’t hyperbolic. So here I hope to provide a nuanced view.

Note that my current set of cans and therefore comparison are the Beyerdynamic DT 1990 Pro. I realise this isn’t a fair comparison as they are not only more expensive and not wireless. They are also open back.

Wireless

Wireless low-latency headphones are awesome. Yeah it’s noticeable to me but barely. The range is pretty much studio range. Don’t expect to wear them into a different room but walking around your studio without getting tangled in a long cable works very well. I can keep them on and hop from drums to piano without any interruptions.

User Experience

Getting set up was easy. No installations or software packages. Just plug in an analog signal, pair the transmitter and the headphones and go. There is volume control on the headphones which was set really high to begin with causing a hiss due to the high amplification. After turning the headphones down and the input signal on, it works fine.

There is no battery level indicator. Would have been a useful addition.

Audio Quality

Now here’s the downside. They don’t sound anywhere near as good as my current DT 1990s. I’d describe the quality as nasal and slightly boomy. It’s really disappointing but in hindsight to be expected.

Keep it?



I will live with this set for about a week and use them in the studio. I will decide whether or not to keep them after then. I suppose the big question is: Can I live with the reduced audio quality just because they allow me to hop onto my drum kit without switching headphones?

top 10 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Great review! I remember there was a website that documented frequency curves of different headphones. When I was doing some research to get my current pair of semi-professional monitors, I used the website to pinpoint the ones with reasonably flat sound. Apparently there are a lot of review websites that post their frequency response charts, so they're a great tool if you haven't already used them.

One thing about jumping headphones is that you will get used to your curves even if they're bad, as long as it's your only pair. So listening in to bad curves will normalize them in your brain and sometimes give a perception of worse sound when you get on something flatter. I experienced this when I switched from my moderately bass boosted headphones from some Chinese brand to a comparatively flatter curve of Audiotechnica's ATH-M40x. It felt like a downgrade for a while.

Anyways, I'm sure you know all this already, but I thought it might be helpful context for others. Would be nice if you could dial it similar to your main monitors with an EQ and see if you can overlay the resulting curve with a chart of your DT1990s. I think it would be a helpful point of reference for other buyers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I just made a EQ preset in Bitwig for thr master channel with a proper correction for my akg k240 studio. This helps immensily with mixing. Or at least it sounds more balanced now. Cant verify if this is super correct but you may want to check out this page and throw the data in a eq. Found yours listed in the app too.

https://autoeq.app

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That’s convenient. I might take a look at that this weekend!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There are some commercial soultions as well. I had to compare the results a little and then made an EQ+ preset in Bitwig that was plausible and fitted one of the measured curves as there are newer models from my headphones that are different in response. (AKG K240 Studio)

Parametric EQ worked better than convolution IR.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Yeah I've decided to return the headphones and stick with my better ones. I will just pull some wires to common points where I sit in the studio and plug in headphone there.

Nice idea the wireless, but not so great execution.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I was looking at them recently. But was wondering if I could just get the dongle separate and chuck it on my current cans. Do you know if that's possible?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That would be awesome but no, they built the receiver into the headband. So while I think it might be possible, I am guessing the drivers are extremely easy to drive and attaching just any other driver to the headband will cause trouble. But you can try I suppose.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've got them too, and they're definitely not up to the quality of other studio headphones I've used. Still, I'd use them a lot more if they weren't just a little bit annoying to turn on and off. Having to hold the power button for different amounts of time for the headband vs the transmitter always throws me off.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

So far I've just let the transmitter turned on so I hadn't noticed that yet.