funkmuscle wrote:Hmm, thanx bro! This got me thinking. Would IR files of good mixing rooms work for headphones? I mean simulations of mixing rooms from the point of view of engineer to monitors.
To cross fade? You would need 4 impulse responses:
From Right speaker to Right Engineer ear.
From Right Speaker to Left Engineer ear.
From Left Speaker to Right Engineer ear.
From Left Speaker to Left Engineer ear.
This would crossfade the sound as it was propagating in the room and you were inhabiting the engineer body. Sort of like using HRTFs really, but HRTFs recorded in a mixing room.
If your goal instead is to have a neutral sound, then definitely it will not help. Mixing rooms are designed to be neutral, but not too much. Too neutral rooms produce fatigue for the engineers. Now, you can have a very neutral IR to play with, but as long as you listen to audio through your headphone the result will be colored by your headphone frequency response.
Your headphone is a filter: it colors everything you input to it, even very neutral audio processed by a mixing room IR.
If your goal is to avoid fatigue, then a simple crossfade as you are already doing should help. It does seems that pure stereo is harder to work with for prolonged time.
If your goal is ideal neutrality I am afraid there aren't many viable ways unless you buy a probe microphone and calibrate your own headphone.
Actually...
I maybe got another idea to try to achieve some "neutralish" sound. Pick some solid sheet of something, maybe rigid thin wood. Best if you cover it with a layer of
closed cell foam. Then, make a hole in the middle just big enough to insert the tip of a mic (if you have a small tipped mic, sort of like the measurement mic I posted earlier). Then, place your headphone on this flat surface, centered on the mic, and press just enough to secure a good seal: headphones operate properly only if they seal properly. Stream white noise to the headphone and capture its output with the mic. Open up a narrow band equalizer and a frequency analyzer (calf got both). Tweak the equalizer until the frequency profile of the noise you capture with the mic is as flat as you can possibly get.
This is the cheapest way to do a sort of calibration I think. It will be still unmatched at the high end when you put the headphone on your head... but maybe an improvement.
Otherwise, if you aim to do good mixes, my suggestion it to test your mixes with different headphones and speakers, check that it sounds alright in every situation. If it does, your ear is well adapted to your headphones to mix reliably: it might as well be the case.