I use AKG K701 - now available at a ridiculously cheap price. They were $500 when they were first released a couple of years back. Easily a better solution to treating your room IMO.
I always double-check my mixes against my studio monitors, which are HS80s, but there is very little difference. There is a discrepancy in the 400Hz area between the two - but then again, I don’t know which one is ‘right’ - the AKGs or the Yamahas.
So who’s the winner? The Yamahas or the cans?
By the way, 400 and 6k are a problem on the focal sm9s in my room. I have a tendency to allow too much of those to leak through.
I always defer to the HS80s, over time they have proved themselves to be very reliable in terms of translatable mixes.
Then surely the problem is with you and not the monitors? Or have I misunderstood?
Yeah, I think you misunderstood but I admit I could have phrased that reply better.
So a discrepancy in monitor translation doesn’t automatically equal a problem with the person listening or how frequencies were managed in the mix. In my case there’s a discrepancy between the SM9’s and the JBL4300’s at 400hz. Also between the SM9’s vs JBL’s and the macbook speakers at 6k. The problem is pervasive through an assortment of mixes.
Like yourself on the cans vs the HS80’s, these are not problems you can address by ‘learning to listen closer’ or ‘training your ears better’. Its a simple issue of learning the quirks of translation and learning to live with the reality that my room isn’t perfect. Of course its my own responsibility to deal with frequency problems regardless. And the best way I know how is to defer to a second set of monitors.
You might say ‘well just learn to manage 400 better on the SM9’s’. I think the best way of doing that is simply using a secondary set that doesn’t struggle with how it represents that particular range.
OK that makes sense. As you say, similar to my experience with the cans and monitors. The major difference is that because I can do about 97% of a mix using cans, I can sit in my kitchen doing it, interspersing the process with stuff like making dinner, doing the washing, making cups of tea, drinking beer, waiting for a delivery etc. Small chunks - little and often.