5 Monitoring with Headphones
It is important to monitor your audio at the recording stage to hear what your microphones are actually picking up, and to ensure that you are indeed recording sound at all! Your brain is good at filtering out unwanted sound as it reaches your ears, but your recordings will contain whatever your microphones pick up, and they have different characteristics to your ears.
The best way to monitor the recording is to use ‘encapsulating’ (fully covering the ear) headphones to reduce the ambient sound and enable you to hear exactly what is being recorded. However, there are some important things to understand about headphones, such as the different qualities available and the way they perform. In essence, headphones are a pair of transducers that receive an audio electrical signal and use a pair of close proximity speakers next to our ears to convert the audio signal into sound waves. They come in various designs and levels of quality; from basic earplug types, to encapsulating headphones for personal monitoring of your Hi-Fi, through to professional grade studio headphones.
Whilst earplug-type headphones are fine for listening to personal stereo systems, they do not sufficiently exclude ambient sound to enable you to monitor your recordings accurately. They will tell you whether sound is being recorded, but will not enable you to hear detail or accurate levels of what is being recorded across the frequency spectrum.
Hi-Fi headphones are fine for checking audio levels, and that your microphones are working well and are not producing pops or crackles. They will also provide a good level of exclusion of ambient sound. However, as they are designed to enhance music reproduction they will not necessarily provide you with an accurate reproduction of the tonal qualities of the recording and, more importantly, how that recording will sound on your clients’ TV or monitor.
Studio quality headphones provide a ‘neutral’ sound – without the tonal enhancements provided in Hi-Fi headphones. There will be less warmth and clarity added and the low and high frequencies will not be boosted.
Finally, when purchasing headphones it is important to test how comfortable they are to wear as you will be wearing them frequently and often for extended periods. It is advisable to take the trouble to test the various models before you purchase.
5.1 The Dangers of Hearing Damage
If you use your headphones at too high a volume level it can cause temporary or permanent hearing impairment or deafness. This often occurs unintentionally when filming in noisy environments. The sound recordist will naturally set the volume in the headphones at a higher level to compete with the background noise (a process known as ‘masking’), especially in excessively loud environments such as live concerts, roadsides, railway stations and airports, in large crowds and at wedding reception discos. The damage to your hearing may not be noticeable at the time, but when exposed to this for extended periods it is very damaging.
As a result, many audio engineers and musicians suffer from Tinnitus and some hearing loss. Tinnitus is the medical name used to describe ringing noises in the ears. For some this manifests itself as a mild ringing noise, whereas others are troubled by a loud, high pitched noise. Sadly, as yet there is no known effective medical treatment for this condition.