I agree - don't mix with headphones. They can be used to create very rough mixes late at night when you dont wanna wake the kids, or disturb the office next door, but use air and space for your real mixing.

I'm sure you'll get alot of speaker recommendations - I use Mackie HR 824s. I love 'em.

You can mix through headphones, but it isn't a particularly good idea.

I was in the music production business before I got into video back in the late 1970s and, for me, the audio is more important than the video. Watch the news with the sound off and see how much you get out of it. Personally, I prefer to mix through Adam speakers. I have mixed through a LOT of high-end studio monitors over the years, but nothing quite compares to the Adam speakers for accuracy, depth and detail and how well the mixes translate to the real-world. All my recording engineer friends have gone nuts for the Adam speakers. They aren't cheap, but their Adam A5 powered multimedia speakers are reasonable.

http://www.adam-audio.de/studio/

If they are a little too rich for your blood, The Alesis "M1Active MKII" speakers are affordable and quite decent. And there is nothing wrong with the Mackie or Tannoy speakers either.

Really, any decent reference monitor will do. However, the MOST important part of purchasing a set of speakers comes AFTER the purchase. You MUST get used to the way they sound by listening carefully and intently to a variety of commercial music, film and video releases to get an idea how they sound through your speakers in your room and then that sound becomes your "target" when mixing your own stuff. That's why they call them "reference monitors."

I use nEar 06 from ESI as speakers, but also have headphones:

http://www.audioreview.com/mfr/sony/headphones/mdr-cd780-digital-reference-/PRD_126612_2750crx.aspx

http://www.esi-audio.com/products/near06/

I like them both, but I do nut use the headphones that much.

/Ulf

To drown out computer fan/hd/ac noise, and also not cause me unbearable pain while wearing my requisite reading glasses, I like the V-Moda Bass Freq earbuds.

They are highly recommended on CNET, and cost about $40.

With a little practice, I find very few surprises when I move it to my living room 5.1 custom theater system with Sony, Cerwin Vega, Klipsch, and Advent components.

Just my impressions, you understand.

By the way, if you decide to go with monitors, do not forget a critical choice - sound dampening.

Use Auralex here and there in the room where you will mix and monitor. Not too much - no need to create an anechoic chamber. I placed plenty of triangular tiles on the back wall and then a few pyramid tiles on the front and sides.

www.auralex.com

Mike

Good suggestion about the Auralex. When you're listening to speakers, they are just "tickling" the air in the room and what you're hearing is really more the room and less the speakers. There is no way even the best speakers will sound good in a bad sounding room.

"I was in the music production business before I got into video back in the late 1970s and, for me, the audio is more important than the video. "

Please pass that on to all in the visual media world. Seriously. I know producers in my market that have very high budgets on national corporate projects, but save none for audio post and figure they can mix it in Final Cut (sorry, few Vegas guys in our area). I see too many producers that ignore audio, not for budget reasons, but lack of understanding.

I know not everyone is in a market that can budget but if you can, consider sending out your work for audio post. It is difficult to master two media at once. We audio post engineers are here to make you look better by making you sound better. Most here already know that though.

If your market just doesn't support the budget for contracting out work, do the best you can with decent monitors (most anything less than $500 each is going to have some tradeoff, but just be aware of it going in).

But the key is with whatever you use, you have to know your monitors and your room (a treated room if possible) to get a good mix, even with just a narrative VO and background music, so listen to a lot of material on anything you get new and aren't used to before your first mix - DVDs in your market/production style, ads, music, etc

Tannoy makes good monitors, though the lower end models lack clarity, as do most below the $400-$500/each range - usually the midrange gets muddy, and/or the top end is harsher, and/or there just isn't an accurate low end. Event makes some nice sounding monitors, though the ones I would recommend are about $600/ea last I checked.

As far as Auralex - your results will be mixed with foam - they usually don't do a lot across a broad spectrum - minimal cut of the high end, but won't address mid/low response (foam bass traps are usually minimally effective at best). The best option are fiber panels (and many of them if you can't test the room for nodes/response and place them strategically) - prefab (not cheap) or rock wool DIY - 2" or higher for better low end control. Sound blankets can do more than foam - thicker and heavier. If you are in a pinch, even blankets/quilts or thick drapes can help quite a bit.

Also put your monitors along the longest axis of your room.

Headphones aren't great for mixing, but if it is all you have, spend $100-$200 if you can and you can increase what you hear and improve how you EQ to some degree - just hard to judge depth and width - AKG, Sennheiser and Sony have some good headphones around $100 I believe, though Sony's MDR (?) series is best for talent/musician headphones in the studio since they are closed ear.

"I want a good set of cans for my ears that aren't going to fatigue me if I end up wearing them for long periods of time."

Sony's MDR-7506 are pretty much the standard fair. The 7509s that we've got have a bit more bottom end and a higher price. As one old audio hand said of the Yamaha speakers that used to be pretty common "at least we all mixed to the same thing"

I'd imagine from your past posts you're not mixing music. I've got a reasonable set of Behringers in the wrong place in a horrid room, at least I can sort of calibrate my ears and hear the difference a little Eq makes with these. Thing is though when I listen to the same mix through the average TV it's a different sound completely. Always mix and check what you're doing on what and where it's mostly going to be listened to.

Worth a mention that in my experience headphones accenuate defects in audio quite a lot because the 'speakers' in the headphones fire directly into your ears. Any noise sounds much worse, then again if it sounds clean in your cans you know it's really clean.

Bob.

The entire idea behind sound absorption is to get the absorbing material to sympathetically vibrate at the frequency(s) you are trying to remove. By causing it to vibrate you are taking acoustic energy and turning it into heat. The trick is to make a material that can be made to vibrate at (and therefore, absorb) a wide range of frequencies.

Neither sound blankets, foam nor fiberglass can effectively absorb low frequencies (much below 125 to 250 hz) which is usually the root of most room problems. For that you can use bass traps in the corners.

"Room modes" are resonances that happen in every enclosed space and the frequency of each resonance is directly related to the room's dimensions. For example, a room 12 feet long has a mode at 47 Hz because walls that far apart create a resonance at 47 Hz. Additional modes happen at multiples of 47 Hz because those frequencies also resonate in the same space. Wall spacing that accommodates one cycle of a 47 Hz wave can also fit two cycles of 94 Hz, three cycles of 141 Hz, and so forth.

The formula to calculate room modes is quite simple; take the speed of sound, 1130 feet per second, and divide it by twice the dimension. This is the base mode, subsequent modes are multiples of the base. (If you're calculating in meters, the formula is 344 divided by twice the dimension in meters.) Twice the dimension is used because a room 10 feet long really has a total distance of 20 feet - the wave travels from one end to the other and back to complete one cycle. So for a room 10 feet long, the first mode occurs at 56.5 Hz:

This formula can be simplified by taking 1/2 the speed of sound (565) and dividing by the dimension. ie. 565 / dimension in feet.

When you play a single musical note having the same pitch as the resonance of the room, that note will appear louder and have a longer reverb time than other notes just above or below that note. This is wholly undesirable because some notes are emphasized more than others, and the longer reverb time reduces clarity. Room modes are very important because they directly affect the "character" of a room. Room resonances can be reduced by adding bass traps, but you can't get rid of them entirely.

The absolute worst shape for a room is a perfect cube - for example - ten feet long, ten feet wide, and ten feet high - because all three dimensions are the same and all three dimensions resonate at the same frequency. A 10-foot cube-shaped room will have a really strong resonance near 55 Hz, which is the open A string on a bass. So when that low A is played it will sound a lot louder than other notes. This room also has a longer reverb time at that pitch, so low A notes will sustain longer and conflict with other bass notes that follow.

A room that has dimensions that are multiples of each other - like 10 feet by 20 feet - is nearly as bad as a cube because many of the same frequencies are emphasized. The goal is to have a room shaped so that it spreads the modes evenly throughout the low frequency range. This is done by building a room whose ratios of length, width, and height are as unrelated as possible. Although usually impractical, building a room with no parallel surfaces is a great place to start. Rooms with angled walls or vaulted ceilings a desirable. Unfortunately, because of the angles involved there is no easy way to calculate the room modes exactly. The modes still exist - they're just much more difficult to figure out.

Generally, tuning a room is a careful combination of sound dispersion to break up standing waves and sound absorption to control the higher frequency reflections. Small rooms are particularly difficult to tame because they have fewer modes that are further apart, large rooms have better low frequency response because they have more modes that are more closely spaced.

A lot of people think that putting egg cartons on the wall actually does something, but in reality, it just disperses the sound at a very narrow range of frequencies. It's essentially useless and looks stupid. However, acoustic foam is often shaped that way to present a larger sound absorbing surface area.

Acoustic foam is considerably different than regular packing foam. (Packing foam is as useless as egg cartons.) There are basically three types of foam, "reticulated" which is where post-processing of the foam removes the membranes of the cell, leaving only the skeletal structure intact."Closed cell" foam membranes are completely sealed. Acoustic foam is a combination of the two, it is an open-cell foam that has both closed and open cell membranes of varying degrees. It can evenly absorb a fairly wide range of frequencies. Block fiberglass is also very good and block 4" thick can absorb frequencies as low as 125 hz.

This acoustic stuff can be infinitely more complicated than video stuff.

Many years ago I did a sound design course at Bournemouth University in the UK. Because there were six workstations in the room, each group had to work with headphones. Always the surprised comment would be, when playing out their projects on the TV, "Oh, I can't hear half my audio, it's too quiet, where’s it gone?" Headphones are great for detail, but yes, unless you've got and are using good speakers, all this will be lost. (I brought down and always used my PPM meters, which gave me a constant visual guide while mixing. Consequently, my mixes were consistent and (sorry, sounds slightly boasting here) better than the other students.) The one major thing I didn't like about that course was that it was too focussed on the creative side, without giving the students a proper grounding in the technical side. You can be as creative as you like, but that won't matter if you can't use the equipment properly.
Bottom line: Decent audio makes the picture look better.

btw. One of the many things I like about Vegas is that I can mix an entire video project to a broadcast standard within the editor itself. It can do just about everything that Sonar can do. The only time I have to go to Sonar is when I'm composing the music.

Right, back to the edit bay...

John Cline has given a nice summary. Another issue, is outside sound entering the room. Double space walls,heavy doors...etc... all help. Sand can be a great damper, adsorbs low and high freqs well. Basicly, sound is air movement, transferring its directional energy is the engineering "key".