Headphone Essentials for Podcasters and Musicians #05

Martin00:01:47

Welcome to Studio Fusion. I am Martin Lindeskog. Deborah, co-host, has something to do today, so she can't be here at the moment, but we have honorable Michael here, Executive Producer. Hi, Michael, how are you doing?

Michael00:02:07

I'm doing very good, Martin. Nice to be on the show.

Martin00:02:12

Yeah. And we were talking about headphones and how you plug them into the microphones and how it sound in a good way. And I.A new word for me is closed-back headphones. What's that?

Michael00:02:27

Right. Well, let's talk about the three different types. Well, there's more than three, but the main three different types of headphones.

Martin00:02:34

Yes, please do, please, some background. I'm oval. Yeah.

Michael00:02:40

So let's talk. Let's talk about headphones. Old school headphones. As you can see, they kind of look like what I have on here.They've been around for, you know, 100 years. They're just a pair of speakers on the side. Right. That put sound into your ears. And the idea is to not have the room hear much of it. Okay.The difference between open-back, semi-open-back, and close back is how much of that background sound, how much of the sound is able to leak out into the environment around you.Now, a lot of people that just want to be able to have that experience of, of sound close to them but don't necessarily need to not heard it in the room. If you're talking super high fidelity, you want an open-back headphone.You want that speaker to be able to move freely and be able to give sound on either side to some degree so that it can give you great clarity. Okay. A semi closed would be closed up enough where it doesn't bleed out into other things very much.Like if I crank these headphones with music all the way on an open-back would actually, you'd be able. Outside people would be able to hear fairly clearly.I send my closed-back, you're going to hear a little bit of it kind of like when you're on the bus or something and you hear somebody with their little speakers and, you know, their earbuds and they're so loud you can hear that. That's a semi-open-back. Okay.And then the next step is a fully closed-back, which is what these are here is these are so closed in sound that I can't hear or hear very little of the room noise. But it also affects pressure on your ears so that it feels really weird when you wear them or try to talk because you can't hear yourself very well.But also any sound that happens Here, or very little of it would leak into a microphone that would be close to you.

Martin00:04:37

Good. You said about comfortable. Maybe the normal person is not comfortable to talk in a microphone and have headphones.Could you then explain why is it good to have microphones and what's really bleeding?

Michael00:04:51

Well, my background is in the recording industry.So if we're in the studio and we're going to play some music into somebody's headphones and for instance, want a musician or a vocalist to sing with it, you don't want that music to be part of that recording. You want it to be almost nothing, if not nothing at all there. So then you can edit it and manage it there.And with that process, that allows you to have a very clean recording without a lot of background. The same thing here.If we're monitoring other people talking, we don't want their talking to be caught in our microphone and rebroadcast back out to others. And that's why a lot of times you'll hear in these group chats, you'll hear a bunch of echo.What the echo is is their sound bleeding into multiple microphones. And it creates a very weird echoey sound. Kind of like talking in a big room or a big long hall.

Martin00:05:45

Yeah, and that could be a hard one. Yep.

Michael00:05:49

And that can be very, very hard. So now let's talk about the other type of earphones that, that are much more modern. These little earbuds, right.As far as I know, they don't make a closed-back version of earbuds.They are sort of closed-back because they're buried deep in your ear and the sound they make is so small that it doesn't bleed out very far, but they still do.And so you could have little earbuds in there, but if you stand next to somebody with an earbud, because we've all heard it on the bus on the airport somewhere else, they've got their music crank, they're listening, but you can still hear some of that. And with a microphone it'll pick up those details.And depending on how your microphone is running, like most of the broadcasts here have an auto volume setup. So if you get real quiet, it'll raise the volume until it hears the sound.And if you have an, if it raises the volume and a little bit of noise in the background, you're going to hear that and it's going to carry through. So it's all about making sure your production is as quiet as possible. And of course, Bluetooth headphones, we all love them, right?But there Is a micro delay in the Bluetooth headphones between when the signal is sent out, converted into a broadcast signal and then reconverted back into your earbuds.

Martin00:07:10

Now I have a pretty simple one, but it's getting warm on my ears. But I had a very simple one that maybe Deborah said maybe it's picking up and so on.

Michael00:07:24

If I put my microphones right here, if I put, I don't know if you can see it here, but if I put that microphone right next to my headphones, it'll pick up the music. On a closed-back headphone, it's supposed to pick up almost none. On an open-back headphone it would pick everything up.

Martin00:07:43

Because then I heard about the concept of monitoring and that's what I'm doing in the post production and editing. Then I want to hear it in a good way. But when you want to record and doing this live streaming, then this close back is good.So how do you find closed-back headphones and how, how, what kind of price range could you find them in?

Michael00:08:08

Well, closed-back headphones can come in everything from. Well, the ones I have on now, we, we just recently picked these up. These are made by AKG. They're AKG K92s. They're 50 bucks.They have a very nice sound. They're not. I've got studio headphones that are 1500 $2000. They don't have the clarity of that.But in something like this, we're not really worried about that kind of clarity because we're just monitoring what's going on today live.

Martin00:08:37

And I like for the viewers there and for the listeners after you and Deborah have done the magic work, we could describe headphones that are very fancy with golden touch there, right? Often they are very black.

Michael00:08:55

Yeah, they kind of, you know, they kind of have a golden tone. But see as you can tell when I, when I take them off. Yes, Martin, if you talk, you'll be able to hear yourself.

Martin00:09:05

You can hear it picking up the microphone. But how it could end up.

Michael00:09:09

But when it's closed here, nobody hears it. And that's the difference between an open and closed. And an open would allow that, that little bit of sound to bleed over.

Martin00:09:18

But it's good then to watch the video and then hopefully the listener will understand what we are doing. But that was what Deborah was really getting at.And then as if you're not so familiar with this and don't know it and maybe don't want to have for certain reasons wanting because it's starting getting warm here and you don't know how to do regular headphones, then you don't have it. And then you get that, you could get that results that not sounding good.And for me as not a technical person, trying to editing that out is very hard.

Michael00:09:57

Yeah, once you get a bad sound in an audio track, you can't remove it back out. I mean there's some software that'll limit some of it and that goes into that other side.People say I bought a set of noise canceling headphones and what noise canceling headphones are is it brings the signal in, digitally looks at it and it's looking for duplicate sounds. But an echo, a strong echo or a weak echo can have different digital sounds.And digital, the sound canceling may or may not cancel that because it's looking for two parts, things that are duplicate and things that are room noise kind of thing. And the really expensive ones have a microphone that listens to the room and cancel anything that's that noise that comes into your headphone signal.But they're very expensive to really be very effective. And even at that it's probably only 10 or 20% of the background noise that's removed.

Martin00:10:59

Do you need to have a second pair of monitoring phones when you're doing the editing or post production or could you have the closed-back headphones also?

Michael00:11:09

Now I can edit with closed-back headphones but they don't articulate like in the studio we'll have better headphones because we might have 10 or 20 or 30 different instruments playing in and we have to hear the fine details between the two.

Martin00:11:24

So then I will do talking about this again.

Michael00:12:54

See like these look identical but these are open-back headphones so that speaker will move real easily. But they look the same but they work very different. This one, if I put a mic next to it, it's going to feed back if it's alive live process.

Martin00:13:13

So we will do some and you could say that for record we are not yet sponsored by any headphone companies.And and so we are do taking this honest review but we will do some specific ones that I'm curious about and then you could do your recommendation yet you do this ak. Akg. As you said, the akg.

Michael00:13:34

Yeah, and I these just happened to be.We were looking at me and Deb were sitting looking at Amazon and there was like 50 different closed-back headphones and I have a pair of AKGs in my studio. Deb uses a pair when she's mixing down and they're both good headphones. I've had Shure I've had, I've had several of the other brands.They're all good. It's just a matter of. It's about how the technology is put together.

Martin00:13:59

Yeah. And some are doing both like microphones and headphones. So that's why. I wonder why they don't talk more about it. What the combination.So with that said how this brought up this topic and Deborah and I talked about it is to have a shout out to Gail that often wants to listen and talk when we do live streaming, not on a mobile phone but on in a web browser. And sometimes it's surrounding that could be challenging.And also others that we have had on like Twitter chats or Twitter Spaces or Xspaces, what it's called now.And it could be hard to find, you know these big bulky headphones instead it's very easy to have directly talking into the computer or into the phone or the earbuds. That's yeah. Or the. In the long run. I have an iPhone, an old iPhone, iPhone S6S plus but I have an iPhone 14 unpacked yet.But I am still keeping this one because that was the latest one that you could have this 3.5, you know, putting in the headphones now you have to have this jingle adapter, whatever together and then it's easier it will be in the future. It will only be the Bluetooth but that's for the listening and talking to the phone. It's not for using for recording.

Michael00:15:25

Well, exactly. The iPhone, although it's gone into many markets, the whole idea is the iPhone is more of a consumer based rather than a professional studio.Back in the days when you had the big TV broadcast like the Daily News, you know, each person would have a microphone and many times they didn't have monitors because of this same problem that we have here.But when you're at remote locations you always have a difficulty being able to hear people at the remote and hold a conversation with them without having that being picked up in the microphone.

Martin00:16:01

Hindu Audio Technica Nordic, the salespeople there or vice president there because they had this agency or how you say Agentur or licensing for the Scandinavian or Nordic markets for Nintendo but also Audio Technica.So I'm thinking about that and then I have because I have this RD microphone NT USB mini and they haven't been into headphones but now they have created something called Nth100 and it looks very fancy and interesting.

Michael00:16:43

Through the years I've used many of those brands and they all make a great headphone. It's a matter of when you're reading the fine print of the details of what headphones you're getting.For many years I did the semi-open-back or open-back for a lot of low level recordings because you didn't have live broadcasts that could get an echo.

Martin00:17:05

And then I think we are getting to the end. Vmuda, crossfade, M100 250 bucks.

Michael00:17:13

Okay. Now they may have great sound, but in any of these descriptions are they saying open-back, close back, semi open?

Martin00:17:23

No. That's why for me it was a new word, a new concept. I don't see it anywhere.

Michael00:17:29

And, and I found many times, many times you have to do, you have to do some research on their websites and, and you know, you have to ask those questions because though headphones do isolate you for sound, they don't necessarily isolate the room around you.

Martin00:17:49

Yeah, probably it's what I was thinking. I will have it monitoring when I have talking and having co host and guests, but then mainly for the editing and post production.But now, now giving me something new to think about. So it's good and to joke with it. It's not bad. That's the wrong word. But now I have to, you know, shop around. So that's, that's fun.Where do I know I want. Okay. And when I will do the last sharing here. Share screen and then window. No, where it was in. So do you see it now?

Michael00:19:51

There it came back. Yes, yes, yes. It's giving you a lot of the technical stuff. Now when you read it, do you see anywhere where it says open-back or close back design?

Martin00:20:02

Yeah, that's good, good question.

Michael00:20:05

And I find a lot of the, a lot of the companies don't.

Martin00:20:09

Covers everything. Yeah. From locking the headphones cable, adjusting. But that's more, that's most.

Michael00:20:18

More a user process.

Martin00:20:19

Yeah.

Michael00:20:20

And this is part of that research of being a professional. The more professional you are, the more time you have to spend researching the tools that you have.You know, if you're carpenter, you may have several different hammers to do several different things. Well, as podcast producers we have, we have different tools to do specific things as well.

Martin00:20:40

It's interesting if manufacturers and developers and so that want to sell to podcasters for example and live streamers and whatnot, not include that or describe that.

Michael00:20:55

You know, even the most basic of good headphones versus playing sound out of your speakers and having the microphone there, that is going to pick up you and the other people.

Martin00:21:08

Yeah. So do you have any, you know, ending thoughts, any recommendations?What to do when you want to get headphones together with microphone for podcasting, live streaming, etc. But also for maybe music. So.

Michael00:21:30

Well, and this is, this is the balance you need to do. First of all, it's about a budget, right? Because we all have to do this. Not all of us can go, hey, I want a $5,000 pair of headphones.Not all of us are going to even consider that. So it's a budget. But then it's about looking at what am I, what am I doing with it? Do I need it specifically in my, in my. With large groups?Because if I was broadcasting with large groups, I would make sure I have the best closed-back headphones, keep the volume down so that we minimize our echo, because that's about clarity.

Martin00:22:07

That could be the call to action to think about to getting headphones so you don't get that. And talk to you soon again. And welcome back, Deborah.

Michael00:22:22

You're welcome.

Martin00:22:24

Yeah, soon.

Michael00:22:27

Yes, we hope to see Deborah back on stage very soon. I'm missing her presence greatly.

Martin00:22:35

Yeah. And in the meantime, you could listen to her, right? So that will be the outro to listen to Deborah.So could you, could you please do that, like impromptu, your outro, Michael.

Michael00:22:46

Summertime and the living's easy. Take it away, Deborah...