From some time I am forced to worked on headphones. I don’t have currently any isolated space for recording where I can simply close the door and have more or less silence. All of my gear is located in the room where a lot is happening. TV, phone calls, console playing, my son running across the flat, cats screaming on each other etc.
I am getting more and more tired of this noise and despite I am considering to move out soon I need to find a better pair of headphones than I already have, otherwise I will get totally mad and probably will loose at least some hearing.
I am currently using Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro and despite many people bless them for sound isolation then all that noise I mentioned simply laughs at them.
For work I am using Sony WH-1000MX5 with ANC (which is great) but I don’t think they will be good for any serious work with sound.
After some research I found Neumann NDH 20. There are some opinions claiming that the acoustic isolation is very good. Is there anyone here who can say something about it? Or maybe there is someone like me who had the same problem and have some hints?
I live on the direct descent path of a busy airport… it’s annoying. Nothing works 100% but what works for me it’s the beyerdynamic DT770 M, the sound quality is very similar to my DT990 pros, they have 32db attenuation, the tradeoff is mostly that they are uncomfortable to wear after a while. So I keep both around.
Edit: beyerdynamic could do better with some model names. The M part is the important bit in DT770 M.
I have the NDH20. They’re awesome headphones but they don’t really block out that much sound, especially if comparing them to headphones with ANC. I just put them on while watching a tv show on my laptop at fairly low volume on my laptop to test, and I can still hear it fine, just a bit muffled. Same ballpark as DT770 I’d say, from my memory of those.
Have you considered using Sonarworks or similar with your Sony headphones, if you use a computer for your production? I have the XM3 and they’re fun to listen to but really hyped in terms of bass etc, and Sonarworks/similar seems to do an okay job making them a bit more “sensible”. I know a producer who said they thought the XM5 with Sonarworks was good enough for production on.
In ear headphones is a good shout actually - you can get production grade IEMs I believe? I used to have some IEM type headphones and they really cut out noise, I used the squidgy foam type tips. Didn’t enjoy the sensation of wearing them really though.
Was about to suggest Etymotic, I bought my ER4XRs mostly for isolation since they’re not vented. Combine them with some decent tips and you won’t hear much of the outside world at all.
Sweet! I did some testing of Sonarworks vs a few competitors, they were all in a similar ballpark tbh. Sonarworks software seemed smoothest. I ended up not buying it because the NDH20 don’t really need it, but it seemed great.
On Mac, you can also try eqMac or Rogue Amoeba SoundSource which can do the same kind of thing for cheaper. You can also do a free version using something like Blackhole, Hosting AU app, a parametric EQ plugin and the headphone profiles a user called oratory1990 posted on Reddit. Quite a lot of hassle though! You can also just put a parametric EQ on your master with the same profiles, but you need to remember to disable it when exporting and it won’t affect other audio like Spotify.
I don’t use Windows so not sure but there might be easier/better free ways to do a system wide EQ there.
@tdmusic: I must admit that Sonarworks was a great idea.
I installed it yesterday and initally I was not very happy with the sound after setting the default profile. Today I spent more time with it, adjusted the correction curve, messed with dry wet and finally made Sony WH1000MX5 acceptable for production with ANC on.
Even if I don’t use them for mixing (but I think it’s definitely possible and I will try it) the main goal is to achieve an isolation of noise. And it did the trick.
Hey! Happy to hear that . I found it tricked me into thinking it sounded bad when testing for two reasons:
Sonarworks makes the output quieter, so that the frequencies it has boosted rather than cut have no chance of clipping. You can turn this off if you want to do a more fair A/B
When you flip between on and off, it sounds weird, almost like it’s weirdly filtered or something. I think this is just how your ear reacts to the change in EQ, if you leave it on for a while you stop hearing it. I guess this is one benefit to having it on all the time, so you always hear the corrected audio even for web audio etc.
Happy to hear it helped you out anyway! I might pick it up next time it’s on sale as when I travel I only bring my Sonys or AirPods usually.
Unfortunatelly your only real option is to keep using the Sony’s. They have one of the best anc and at least they sound pretty good. I suggest you just use them and then correct things with beyerdynamics once you have some minutes of silence in the house.
[EDIT] I do myself wish that the studio headphones manufacturers would finally start releasing wired models with anc. The technology has grown, and maybe we could get at least decent options. Of course I might not know what I’m talking about, and getting flat unaltered sound/good soundtage with anc is not really feasible.
The Sonarwork suggestion is actually good , I will give it a try.