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Originally Posted by RobML  a lot of people have said they learn on NS10's and the hs50m's are similar in principle. i would also like to start out along a similar path. the main purpose of this excercise is to create mixes that sound good on other peoples hi-fi systems. |
This common point of view I'd like to declare as obsolete. The way to get mixes sounding good on the enormous range of playback systems out there is to get them sounding as good as possible on the most revealing monitors you can afford.
Each monitor and room provides you a different subset of the mix, a different perspective. Only if you get every detail in the mix as good as you can are all the subsets also going to be good. If you mix through a subset, no matter how "typical" you feel that subset might be, you are going to miss many problems that will be all too apparent to too many of your listeners.
I had a quick listen to Yamaha's HS80M and I was impressed, but it was a terrible combination of not using reference material and not having anything to compare them to. So my opinion of them is worth next to nothing.
I always suggest people invest in a great set of headphones if they can't afford great monitoring, so they can fix things. A headphone that I think sounds pretty damn poor but reveals tons of problems in a mix extremely well is the Ultrasone Proline 750. This is closed back so it can be used for tracking too. You would prefer the sound of the ATH-M50 or Sennheiser HD600 certainly, but I have started turning to the Ultrasones nearly exclusively for checking mixes. Even though I think they sound pretty awful.
