Gear & setup

Monitoring: speakers, headphones and calibration

7 min read

Monitoring is where most home recordings go wrong, and it goes wrong quietly. The recording is fine, the mix is not, and the reason is that you were listening through a system that was telling you something else.

What you are actually trying to do

Monitoring has one job: let you hear what is on the recording, accurately enough to make decisions. Everything else — how the speakers look, how much bass they produce at maximum volume — is decoration.

Two ways of doing it, and they have different strengths:

• Speakers let you hear how the track will translate to other systems and other rooms. They need space, a treated room and correct levels.
• Headphones are accurate, repeatable, work in any room, and cost less. Their weakness is that they cannot tell you about bass translation or how a mix sounds in a car.

Most home studios use both, with different jobs.

Speakers: what to buy

Size. A 5-inch monitor is the usual recommendation for small rooms, and the reason is straightforward: a larger driver moves more air, and small rooms cannot absorb what it pushes into them. Below about 2.5 meters from a wall, a bigger monitor is almost always a mistake.

Powered versus passive. Powered monitors have their own amplification, which means one less box on your desk and one less thing to level-match. For most home studios, powered is the sensible default. If you already own an amplifier, passive monitors are cheaper.

Room correction. Software that measures your room and applies an EQ curve to flatten it. This is genuinely useful and it is not a substitute for treatment. It corrects for what the measurements find — including problems that physical treatment would have fixed properly. Use it as a finishing move, not a first one.

The specification that matters least: frequency response numbers on the box. Two monitors with wildly different published responses will both be fine in practice. What matters is that they are accurate, that they do not have a bass port that booms, and that the room is not adding its own problems on top.

The specification that matters most: do they distort at the level you listen? Turn them up and listen to something at a comfortable level. If they sound strained, they are too small for the job.

Headphones: the more important purchase

For a home studio, closed-back headphones are the more valuable monitoring investment, and they are usually the better value. Open-back headphones leak sound into the room, which makes them a poor choice for tracking in a treated space.

Closed-back versus open-back.

• Closed-back — the earcup seals around your ear. No leakage, isolates well, and works for tracking. Slightly less open and usually a little less natural-sounding.
• Open-back — the earcup is open. More natural and more comfortable for long mixing sessions, but leaks sound both ways, so you cannot record while wearing them.

Impedance matters when you have a choice. Headphones of 80 ohms or higher need more voltage, and some interfaces cannot drive them properly — the result is low volume and a thin sound. Very high impedance (250 ohms and above) needs a headphone amplifier. If you have the choice, 32 to 80 ohms is the safe zone for interface headphone outputs.

The price reality: the difference between $80 and $250 closed-back headphones is real but smaller than the marketing implies. The difference between $80 and $80 headphones from two different manufacturers can be larger. Buy the pair you can afford, and if you can only afford one pair, buy closed-back.

Headphones are the most accurate monitoring you will ever own. They are also the most revealing, which means they will show you problems that speakers in a bad room were hiding from you. That is a feature.

Headphone mixing: the missing ingredient

Headphones do not reproduce the low-frequency interaction between the left and right ear that speakers do, so mixes made on headphones can sound hollow or oddly wide. A crossfeed plugin blends a little of each channel into the other, approximating speaker behaviour. Many DAWs include one; otherwise they are inexpensive plugins from any reputable developer.

Crossfeeding is not a magic fix and it is not a substitute for checking your mix on speakers, a phone speaker and a cheap Bluetooth speaker. It is a way to reduce one specific error.

The reference level

This is the most useful and most skipped part of monitoring.

Set your monitoring level so that a familiar, well-mastered track plays at about 85 dB SPL at your listening position — loud enough to judge, quiet enough to work at for hours. Then keep it there. Use a sound level meter app if you have one; most phones can do it, and the calibration on them is rough but the consistency is what matters.

Why it matters:

• Ears tire. Your judgement changes over a session, and it changes with the level you are monitoring at.
• A mix balanced at an exhausting level will sound thin and quiet everywhere else.
• Mixing at a consistent level across sessions is what makes week two sound like week one.

The 60/60 rule is a reasonable daily habit: no more than 60 minutes of continuous listening at a moderate level, with breaks. Hearing damage from a home studio is unlikely if you are sensible, and permanent, so be sensible.

Check your mix in translation

Your monitors are one system in one room. Before you call a mix finished, check it on:

1. Headphones. Catches balance and sibilance.
2. A phone speaker. Brutal but excellent for checking that vocals sit and that the low end is not doing all the work.
3. A decent hi-fi or car system, if you have access to one.
4. A cheap Bluetooth speaker. Surprisingly useful for checking low-end balance, because it cannot reproduce much below 100 Hz and will expose a mix with nothing underneath it.

If the mix survives all of them, it is in reasonable shape.

Practical setup

• Place the speakers at ear height, angled toward the listening position, and away from walls — the distance from the wall changes the bass response dramatically. Moving them 10 cm can change the sound more than any plugin.
• Put the speakers on stands with isolation pads, not on the desk. Structure-borne vibration from the desk muddies the bass response.
• Set up so that the speakers and your head form an equilateral triangle. It is the standard advice for a reason.
• Keep a consistent distance from the speakers. Moving your head 30 cm changes what you hear.
• Turn off anything that is not part of the signal chain: phone notifications, the computer's own sounds, a fan.

A diagnostic checklist

When a mix sounds wrong, work through these in order:

1. Is it the room? Untreated rooms add their own bass and reflections. Check on headphones.
2. Is it the level? If you are mixing at an exhausting volume, stop and rest.
3. Is it the mix? Low-pass the whole track and check the arrangement still works; the problem may be masking.
4. Is it the recording? Solo the suspect track. If it sounds wrong there, no amount of mixing fixes it.
5. Is it translation? Check on the phone speaker.

The order matters. Most people jump to step 5 and never work backwards.