Everyone loves a pair of fancy headphones!
Some are fashion statements, others look like apostrophe’s but all of them let you listen to a podcast.
So what’s wrong with fancy headphones?
I have a pair of Marshall headphones which are very nice. They’re designed like the old 70’s Marshall guitar amps and they give audio a nice rocky/stadium feel and this is the problem.
I used to use them to edit my podcast and it always sounded like my voice had too much bass in it so I’d make a few EQ adjustments when editing to remove a little bass so my voice sounded more natural.
I did this for many episodes of my podcast and I even thought of changing my microphone as I thought it was causing the extra boom and bass.
One day I was on the train and realised I’d left my Marshalls at home so I plugged in my spare in-ear headphones that came with my phone. I pulled up my podcast, gave it a quick listen and ‘oh my days’ it sounded like there was no bass or roundness to my voice.
Then I realised what had happened.
The Marshalls were adding bass and boom to the audio when I was editing so I removed said bass, but the actual audio track itself sounded fine and really didn’t need any processing.
The headphones were changing the sound of the audio and I was compensating for it.
Once I listened on a non-fancy set of headphones it didn’t sound too good.
So what I did was buy a paid of studio monitor headphones, with a cable, not Bluetooth.
They don’t alter the sound at all, you hear exactly what you’ve recorded so you’re making editing decisions based on the actual sound of the recording.
The headphones I chose were Audio-Technica M60x but any monitoring headphones will do the job.
I’m much happier with the sound now, I didn’t need to change my microphone and I just use my Marshalls to listen to music and podcasts. I don’t edit with them!