Hi Emmett,
I keep hearing people say headphones aren’t good enough for serious work, and I should get speakers. Thoughts?
Thanks,
Shel
Hi Shel,
What kind of work? That’s a very broad statement, and one that I’ve heard many times. It’s often parroted by people who heard or saw it in a context that had little to to with voiceover work.
VO recording is all about precision. Working with music is not. That isn’t to say music recordings lack precision, but rather than one single track sounding perfect, the goal is to make the combination of many tracks sound amazing. Two different jobs, two different approaches.
Monitor speakers are great for getting the “big picture.” Headphones are a magnifying glass on one portion of what will eventually be a part of a larger picture. Voiceover work is (usually) not the big picture, itself. It is an important feature of a bigger picture. Therefore, getting to the point, headphones are a much more important tool for the job, than monitor speakers.
There are other reasons too. Most home voiceover studios are not treated appropriately for listening. Without a dedicated listening room, with significant specialized treatment, monitor speakers won’t sound right. A booth that’s treated well for a VO recording, is woefully inept for critical listening. Likewise, most rooms, at least in home studios, that are treated well for listening, are not good spaces to record VO. Headphones get around this because, within reason, the space around you while listening, is unimportant.
Editing is harder on speakers. Upcutting a breath can ruin a good recording. Partial breaths are very easy to hear on headphones, but often not on loudspeakers. The same goes for room tone anomalies, body shifts, and mouth clicks.
And then there’s the cost. A really exceptional set of headphones is fairly affordable. Comparably exceptional monitors speakers cost about 10-50 times as much. As you might guess, I use both headphones and monitor speakers in my studio, because I work with many different kinds of material. My “inexpensive” backup monitors cost roughly 10 times as much as my headphones. My main monitors cost almost 35 times as much. And it isn’t because I’m using especially cheap headphones. I would consider them to be in roughly the same equipment class as the monitors. There’s just that much difference between a professional set of headphones, and a professional set of monitor speakers.
For a voice actor, a set of quality monitors is a luxury, not a necessity. Good headphones, however, are an absolutely essential part of any voice actor’s kit.
Emmett
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