On a budget: Headphones or speakers?

WHEN producing music, one of the most essential tools is a good system to reference your tracks on.

Without an accurate way to monitor how your track sounds, you will be mixing to a reference that is not reflective of how the music should actually be.

This is the main reason why studios are very expensively sound-treated. If the speakers or room has too much bass, the mixing engineer will turn down the lows in the studio, resulting in a track that has less bass than is ideal.

Likewise, if a reference monitor doesn’t reflect the highs very well, the mixing engineer will turn them up – resulting in an overly shrill-sounding mix elsewhere.

Ideally, as you will see from the analysis below, the best route to go is to have both headphones and speakers, but let’s say you are just getting into the game, what do you buy first?

This guide will weigh up the pros and cons of the budget choice between good headphones and good monitors.

Pros for buying good headphones

THE main advantage of headphones (from a budget standpoint) is their versatility. If you are a producer with limited cash, then headphones will offer many advantages to speakers.

Firstly, I am going to assume you don’t live in a mansion with no neighbours to worry about.

Headphones allow you to mix whenever you like and at any volume without disturbing people next door or in your house.

They also offer the portability advantage so you can work on tracks anywhere – provided you have a laptop – and the “mixing environment” will be the same.

Unlike speakers, they don’t have the restraints of the surrounding room’s acoustics and so you are free to mix in any sized room without worrying about resonances and echoes.

Headphones are also generally cheaper than speakers with much less hassle to set up. Speakers require the correct placement as well as room treatment to get the best out of them (by best I mean most accurate frequency response).

They also offer the advantage of much deeper basses with the more expensive brands able to accurately replicate all the way down to 20Hz – the lowest frequency we can hear – which is something an expensive subwoofer is normally required for.

Going back to the room ambiences, headphones will allow you to hear sounds as-they-are without any additional reverb. This can lead to mixes sounding sterile or clinical, especially for songs destined for large clubs or venues.

The upside of this is you get a more accurate reference of timings for vocals and transient sounds.

Pros of buying good speakers

A major advantage of good speakers for monitoring is their “natural” sound.

With speakers, the sound is played out into the room in a way that it would be heard live. This means that the stereo field in correctly placed monitors will highlight issues that aren’t obvious on headphones because they inject the sound directly into your ears.

Trust me when I say the best stereo mixes shine, not on headphones, but perfectly placed studio monitors.

While this may not be the highest priority for some people, I’m going to make it so. Headphones are likely to damage your hearing in long bouts of mixing and producing.

Volume creep is a real thing and having the sound in such close proximity to your ears is really bad for you. As a musician, you want to protect your favourite tools.

While you can still damage your hearing with speakers, there are generally cues that tell you it is too loud. Things on your desk will rattle with the kicks and bass – perhaps a warning that you’re listening too loudly.

The other benefit to speakers is that smaller track elements are easily lost. This may sound like a bad thing, but if you mix exclusively with headphones, you may find your backing vocals or secondary elements lost in the mix as soon as the track is played into a room.

I always find that when I mix on headphones, the hi-hats are way too quiet. The sound great in the headphones, but as soon as I reference them on speakers they are lost in the mix.

This has led to some embarrassing cases where I show someone a track on their good speakers and the mix sounds muddy and thick.

One of the scary terms for beginners is phase. This is hard to detect in headphones. When sounds are out of phase, they cancel each other out. For it to be a problem, the sound waves need to be meeting together in the air.

If your headphones have elements with phasing issues it will be harder to detect than if the phasing happens from speakers.

With speakers, it can be pretty obvious as you walk around the room or even just lean forward as the bass can pop out or totally disappear. If elements are completely out of phase it can kind of sound like they are turning inside out in your head.

Try testing it out yourself with good speakers and flip the phase of a channel. as you move your head, the sound will “twist” as elements and frequencies comb in and out.

If I buy both, what should I cheap out on?

Of course, the best thing to do, even if you are on a budget is to get both. I recommend spending around £70-£100 for headphones and between £100-£300 for speakers – more if possible.

This will actually give you better sound via the headphones despite the cheaper price (think how much less material and electronics they need).

In buying a good, accurate pair of headphones, and having a medium-level pair of speakers, you can get most of the tough and precise work done in the headphones and constantly reference against the speakers.

This will mean you must make some compromises. Most £100-£300 speakers will be pretty poor for the deepest bass sounds. If you are new to mixing any music you will likely be impressed with the bass, but trust me it isn’t accurate enough to go by alone, particularly if you are in a room without any sound treatment.

For the low-frequency work, trust the headphones. In fact, for most of the work, trust the headphones, but then make sure the stereo width and higher frequencies, in particular, translate well on the monitors.

The final word

If you are starting with around £100 then the best thing to get is headphones. They will offer you a lot more versatility and are great for students and young people especially because of small flats/dorms/family houses.

Once you have good headphones, one of the next investments should be good speakers. The added detail that speakers offer is important but if you are totally fresh to production then your ears might not be tuned well enough yet to pick them out – that’s OK!

I always recommend you ask around, and if possible, test out good speakers yourself. Booking a session in a studio is expensive, but worth it to hear how music should sound on good-quality gear. When you start off, it’s easy to recognise what sounds bad, but until you hear just how good music can sound on the right system, it is hard to make the right decision.