Hi David--
Your monitoring experience matches that of many people. On standards
of natural settings, our homes are loud, mechanical-sounding
environments. Headphones and buds are the only alternatives to
significantly reducing them in new construction or pretty major
remodeling.
If listening to your nature recordings over expensive or low cost
speakers is at all stressful, the environment they are in is to
blame. Played at comfortable sound levels, what you want to hear is
buried/obscured by ambient sounds that you don't want to hear. Played
at a volume loud enough to bury the background sounds, flaws in room
acoustics become evident along with the annoying bass and lower
register drones that surface with substantial amplification. For
broadband location sounds with "spatiality," playback through
speakers in a typical workroom is usually very disappointing.
Which is better, good speaker environments or headphones? Speakers
can create a fundamental spatial materiality-- an "out-there-ness"
that headphones lack. From wearing phones through the night and
playing the same material on speakers during the day, its clear to me
that the cues and impacts are very different. If I didn't have
exposure to the speaker imaging, my knowledge of how to interpret
what I hear in phones would be lessened. The opposite is less true
except phones can better inform the highest and lowest frequencies
(if my sub woofers aren't powered-up). I can see why recordists more
interested in high frequency details and less interested in acoustic
space would be happy with phones most of the time.
There are supposedly some binaural listening studies that showed that
some people can't mentally create strong spatial imagery with stereo
headphones. From witnessing 100+ students listening to the same
recordings with the same headphones, I'm not surprised. Personally,
I can create a pretty accurate imaging using phones but I am
definitely aware of it requiring mental work. Critical listening such
as mixing with phones exhausts me after 20-30 minutes. In a good
speaker environment, I can do the same kind of listening for 2-3
hours before I start to wear out. With phones through the night, I've
noticed that my listening retains basic left side right side
assignments quite well, but depth cues diminish over time. I can
restart "full" stereo imaging in the morning with some mental
effort.. Rob D.
= = =
At 3:38 PM +0000 11/26/10, corticalsongs wrote:
>I was curious to find out how and where you listen to nature recordings.
>
>Whether mixing down a recording or listening for enjoyment, I find
>that most of the time I listen with headphones. Headphones really
>isolate me from the outside world and takes me to another.
>
>
>Some of this may also be environmental as I spend much of my
>professional life using a desktop computer in an open office.
>Headphones are really the only option. Also my travel to and from
>work involves commuter rail - another environment that encourages
>the use of headphones.
>
>All that said, it is not uncommon for me to listen to over speakers,
>but I often find that unless I am in a sound room, home listening
>over loudspeakers can be mildly stressful if the content is
>intricate. I think this may be because of a clash of sound spaces.
>Like looking at two images superimposed on one another.
>
>Interested to hear your take.
>
>David
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