Mix engineers at Studio 606 in Los Angeles, headquarters to the Grammy Award-winning band Foo Fighters, recently chose to switch to AKG K371 over-ear headphones from HARMAN Professional Solutions, adding eight new pairs in total.
The majority of bands who record at Studio 606 prefer to track while playing live in the same room, necessitating the use of closed-back headphones capable of providing sufficient noise isolation and preventing audio bleed while offering balanced and uncolored frequency response.
“Usually the musicians we record are sitting in the room with the drummer, so it’s loud,” explains Oliver Roman, an engineer at the studio. “It’s a huge live room and there’s a lot of reflections, so you’re sitting in there just trying to combat the sounds of cymbals and stuff. We had these headphones that were great for a long time, but they were starting to fall apart and weren’t the best at isolating. If somebody was blasting a click track or the music in their headphones, you could hear it throughout the whole room, which caused a lot of sound bleed. We were looking to upgrade, and the AKG K371 isolates really well while still letting you feel the liveliness of the room.”
Equipped with 50 mm transducers with oxygen-free copper voice coils, the K371 offers isolated audio and comfort so that musicians recording together in the live room can clearly hear their individual mixes while still hearing the rest of the room. A drummer using a click track, for instance, will need a headphone mix to be loud enough to rise above their drum playing but not cause the click to bleed into the drum microphones through the headphones.
“You have drummers under 10 or 15 microphones, and since they want to blast the click as much as possible, you’ll hear the click every time they stop playing,” Roman notes. “The K371s have been pretty good at masking that and having a nice balance between isolation and the ability to feel like you’re still playing live. A lot of bands that come in here want to feel like they’re not wearing headphones, and these ones are so comfortable that you forget you’re even wearing them.”
