Mastering with the Sony MDR-V6

[jbrandt]

Hello again folks.

As you can deduce, I am mastering an album currently.

I have been using the MDR-V6, which are a knowingly bright headset. I have been very happy with their detail. I hear problems in these cans that I could never have picked up on my studio monitors--so as a mixing headset they are great.

Now on to mastering:

I have the mix sounding superb in the cans. When I listen to this mix with some other systems, particularly the older home stereo systems, the high end appears to be lacking.

Question:

For those of you mastering with the MDR-V6, do you EQ the final master to be deliberately bright in the cans in order to accomodate standard stereo systems, or do you just mix to perfection in the cans and leave it at that?


thanks again, folks.

-jared

[TotalSonic]

Using headphones for mastering is usually only done in professional dedicated mastering studios for final quality checks (i.e. making sure there are no undesired clicks or pops or distortions present in the program) and not as a way to come to processing decisions. The vast majority of mastering occurs using full range and as close to possible flat frequency response monitors available, generally in tuned rooms. Anytime I've made eq judgements based on headphones (no matter how supposedly accurate the models I was using and no matter how familiar I was with them) I've found the results did not translate that well to other systems - whereas with my reference monitoring system I've had tons of success at having much wider translation. ymmv - but you might want to consider about 40 years of prior collective experience as to what methods works best towards making decisions for final processing.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[demodoc]

Your experience is par for the course with V-6's. They are a VERY BRIGHT set of headphones. My experience in using them years ago was that I had to make them just SCREAM at me to make things sound OK on most speaker systems, which is why I stopped using them. Yes they have lots of detail and if you can stand how they sound you can get great results using them. I have been using Grado SR-60's and have been more satisfied than with any other headphones I've ever used, but that's just me. Obviously, YMMV.