I'm not going to argue with you -- I have the same problem with the ubiquitous white coned Yamaha NS10 monitors, and I find them very similar. Yet for some reason I can "take" the Sony headphones, but not the Yamaha speakers.
I hated the NS-10s the first time I tried to mix with them in the late 80s, and would never use them. I don't care who does. But it's interesting you brought this up, as to me, the Sony cans are the NS10s of headphones. You see them everywhere. But opinions on whether they're useful will vary.
Quite honestly, I don't think studio headphones should be pleasant -- and by that I mean the least bit euphonious.
Nonsense!! Mythology! (meant in good humor).
Euphonious? The word means "pleasing to the ear." It doesn't mean
inaccurate. Accurate transducers are what is pleasing, inaccurate ones are not.
But I think what you meant is that studio monitors and cans shouldn't have "pretty coloration" or inaccuracy designed in to make the music sound better than it is. And with that I agree.
Studio monitors and headphones should be
accurate. However, a
ccurate doesn't mean unpleasant, unless the music is unpleasant. A headphone with no depth of field is
not accurate, if in fact the headphone can't
reproduce the depth of field you've created.
Going back to the NS-10s for a moment, one of the magazines did a very interesting test on them within the past few years, to see how accurate they are, given their reputation. Surprisingly, they measured very well in terms of frequency response and distortion at certain listening levels! But to me, they sound horrible. I think the problem is their inability to parse dynamic range, and to reveal low level detail and spatial dimension. So you have to crank them to hear that, and that's when some kind of distortion creeps in to make them sound nasty. In any case, I can't use them. Even the magazine's testers acknowledged how difficult long listening sessions are with them.
I've been at this studio business recording my compositions and productions for my living for 27 years. My mixes have been on TV and radio on a daily basis for that entire time. That isn't to brag, it's to point out experience in the business, and fact is, my stuff wouldn't have gotten through audio post and client approval unless it was right, not just to my ears, but to other people's ears. People think enough of what I do that I guest lecture on music production at U of Michigan's music school and AES. So evidently, I'm not a complete lunatic. I'm only a partial lunatic.
When I take mixes to post houses, they translate. And they translate regardless of whether the post house uses the same monitors I do. They sound like I mixed them, whether that's on TV, on radio, in the car, on earbuds, and even on laptop speakers. My monitors are accurate, and my headphones are also accurate.
Actually, let me rephrase that - my monitors and cans are as accurate as any inherently compromised transducer is given current technology. Because as we all know, there are no truly 100% accurate speakers or headphones in the world right now. You can put music on a pair of $50,000 soffit mounted monitors, and no one is going to think it's an actual band playing live in the room, even if the recording was done live.
However my monitors sound fantastic for what I need! I love listening to music on them, as well as working with them. So, no. Good sounding monitors are a
good thing, as long as they're accurate given the limits of today's technology. And of course unfortunately the room they're in has a lot to do with how they sound and are evaluated.
As to the Ultrasones, no other headphone localizes an instrument in space as well, and the frequency balances are right, at least on the set I use as a secondary reference. They're also extremely revealing of reverb tails, and other little details. I use them as a tool to check for the subtle details. their limitation comes in their ability to reproduce the lowest bass at high volume. They don't do a good job with low bass at high levels, but that's not what I use them to check. Same with the Blue headphones in other areas - they're a little bass heavy, but gosh, they reveal incredible low end detail at the same time. So they're not perfect. But they reveal other subtle details.
Find me a perfect pair of headphones, please - I'll thank you. So far, I think we're fairly limited with what transducers can do.
The best sounding, and most accurate, cans I've owned are the Grado 1000s. However, their impedance was too low to use with the Neve summing mixer I had, so I got rid of them. Probably that was a mistake, though I did sell them for more than I paid for them in the 90s...
When I had the Stax cans in the late 70s and early 80s (I was doing music as a hobby back then), they were a
revelation, compared to the Shure cans that were the standard back then. They had a very accurate frequency balance, and revealed a lot of detail. I disagree that they had pretty coloration, at least the set I was using. In fact, I still have them in my storage room somewhere. I should pull them out and take another listen just for grins.
A great mix is not a bunch of instruments in your face at the same volume level. It's got three dimensionality and detail, and it's important for headphones used in the studio to be able to reproduce that three dimensionality and detail. If the cans can't do that, they fail, at least for me.
Also, if I can't stand to sit in front of a pair of monitors all day, and if I can't stand to listen to a pair of headphones for long enough to be able to get from them what I need, they are
useless. There are great sounding, fully professional, studio monitors out there. Same with headphones.
I never agree to disagree. I like to convince people to give things another listen, and I will as well. We can all learn from each other. Closing one's mind and calling a discussion off is never a good thing in my world.
Let me say one more thing in this context: the problems come when one says, "this sounds accurate, and that does not." Because given today's imperfect technology when it comes to transducers, what's the reference standard? There isn't one! If there was, all pro level monitoring equipment would sound pretty much the same, it would all be designed to meet it. The BBC tried creating a reference standard with their old BBC monitoring systems made by KEF, Harbeth and Rogers back in the 60s and 70s. Well, I used those speakers back then, and they weren't more than standard bookshelf monitor accurate, even by the standards of that day. And they're still on that concept - only now, they have Dynaudio Airs as their radio and recording reference.
Don't get me wrong, I like Dynaudio speakers, and along with my Genelecs, and own a pair of each; they're currently living at my son's studio in LA. In any case, it's interesting that the BBC is still trying to create a "standard." My partner and I had standardized on Genelecs for a long time, because all of the post houses in our area use them. But I was seduced by a pair of Event Opals that I brought home to try out, and I think they're more accurate. But accurate based on what reference? It's purely subjective. For me, they sound like what I hear from an instrument in the room. Once you mic something, you've colored it. So a mic can't be a reference, and in fact, you have to have monitors to hear the mic. It gets to be a vicious circle.
Blah blah blah. I go on and on. It's part of being old.
