Is headphone noise leakage avoidable?

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Music Afficionado
Member Since: Aug 12, 2008

First off - let me say Happy New Year to everyone. Because of many people on this board, my new studio is finally up and running and I absolutely love it - I only have a few minor kinks to work out. I will look to post pics soon.

My question is due to the fact that while boucing out some individual vocal files I noticed a good bit of leakage from the instrumental track from what I am assuming are the headphones used by the artist in the vocal room. I use the word "assume" b/c I have 2 sliding glass doors spaced about 16" apart which seperate the vocal room from the control room. The vocal room is also extra insulated and I used double drywall and odd angles. Therefore, I dont think it would be coming from the output from the control room monitors. Is this leakage avoidable or correctable (either manually or by some sort of plug-in)? As a DJ I can recall numerous records that had just the accapellas and the background music was almost undetectable. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

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Administrator
Since: Apr 03, 2002


Jan 06, 2009 12:10 pm

I have never, or rarely, noticed any leakage that made much impact...perhaps, as an experiment, try using phones in the control room too, having no speakers on at all, and see if it leaks.

How loud are the speakers in your control room? Many folks make the mistake of cranking them, when typical comfortable listening level is best for tracking.

Also, try different phones, maybe some are worse than others.

And happy new year to you as well.

Music Afficionado
Member
Since: Aug 12, 2008


Jan 06, 2009 12:25 pm

Maybe youre right - maybe its the headphones in the Vocal room that are due for an upgrade. I am using an older pair of Sony MDR V600s.
www.guitarcenter.com/Sony...080-i1126814.gc

I use KRK 8s and a KRK 10" sub but turn them down while recording out of habit and only crank them for a full playback once the artist is done. Plus I do have a nicer pair of monitoring headphones in the control room that I use (mainly after my wife goes to sleep) so I can definitely do the experiment. Thanks.

I am not a crook's head
Member
Since: Mar 14, 2003


Jan 06, 2009 02:24 pm

I tend to get a minimal amount of leakage on my vocal tracks, but its there nonetheless. I record into a MXL 990, which is a mid-sized diaphragm condensor. It's sensitive enough to pick up the leakage of the backing tracks through my headphones (Sennheiser HD240).

I just put a noise gate on the vocal track and adjust it so that only the vocals open the gate. If you adjust the gate's attack and release just right, you can leave the vocal track unaffected while blanking out most of (but probably not all of) the leakage.

Byte-Mixer
Member
Since: Dec 04, 2007


Jan 07, 2009 09:53 pm

Actually, in my recent foray into starting to record my vocals, I've surprisingly found headphone leakage to be pretty tame, and I listen to them at a fairly decent volume to try to jumpstart my brain heh. I'm using ATH-M40fs headphones and recording into an ATH MB3k microphone. Now, being in my apartment, there's a certain amount of background/ambient noise, but I've been using a noise gate to help tame that as well, and it seems to be working decently for me.

I saw a recent freebie on KVR called Starplugs-Gate, which...while very er...christmassy looking, it works for me and seems to do a pretty good job keeping the ambient stuff out and letting the vocals through. Very simple interface, and very adjustable.

Started getting into all of this trying to record my singing to Children of Pripyat. Which hopefully I'll have a better vocal track done in the next few days here. I haven't done much singing since choir 3 years ago, so yeah I'm a bit shaky and out of tune. Trying to get in the habit of doing things in takes rather than one big one-shot. But I'll digress.

You could try to insulate those glass doors if they are suspect....maybe sealing the edges and threshold a bit better somehow? Some sort of resin maybe? If it's the headphones, then using the gate might help a bit, unless it's horribly apparent against the backing tracks. If it's realllllly bad, you may just have to bite the bullet and track it again and adjust the levels of the mic and the headphones.

Anyway that's all I can think of, and I've probably repeated most of what was said before.

-J

Music Afficionado
Member
Since: Aug 12, 2008


Jan 12, 2009 09:49 am

Thanks for the replies. I had a professional engineer/pro tools instructor come by to help me with some overall tweaking last week and when I brought it up to him he said it was completely acceptable so maybe it was just me being a bit paranoid. He did however, bring up the similar gate idea and we applied it which worked pretty well. Regardless, I think I will invest in a better set of headphones next paycheck...

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