Vocal processor sound output through pa..

[Montyburns_4]

I have a tc helicon touch 2 which has lots of presets and custom settings. With headphones in, I have managed to get what I thought were great sounding patches.

 

I then put the output through my Marshall acoustic amp and the sound is very different. The reverb and delay settings I thought sounded perfect through the headphones now sounded muddy and seemed to have to much effect. The amp settings were all set at 12 o'clock.

 

Any idea why there is such a difference?

[WRGKMC]

Its the same issue people have when trying to mix on headphones

 

Its impossible to make certain tweaks using headphones, especially time based effects involving Reverb and echo.

 

First - Headphones do not produce a linear sound. Bass and treble are often boosted and mids are scooped.

 

Second, Headphones place the center of the audio image in the center of your skull. That's not how you hear sound from speakers.

Third, your outer ears are not used like they are when listening to a speaker. When you listen to headphones the left speaker only goes to the left ear and the right speaker to the right. The outer ears change the tone of the sound especially in the upper mid region.

 

4th outer ears are not used and there is no cross feed. When you listen to speaker the right speaker gets to the right ear directly and the left ear hears a shadow of the sound at a lower volume plus reflections. The head blocks some of the sound getting to the far ear and the left hears more delayed reflections. The opposite happens on the left.

 

Between cross feed and the use of the outer ears working like direction finders we are able to judge direction, distances and types of sounds. Our minds learn what's authentic and what's synthetic.

 

When you use headphones you only hear a two dimensional sound on a plane that slices through the center of your head. There is no possible way of judging if the sound is three dimensional and by how much. You can ONLY make those judgements using actual speakers where those speakers are in FRONT of you and you use your outer ears to judge distances from the source.

 

Audio effects are used create aural illusions. Reverb and Echo emulate actual room reflections so your ears have to be in an open room hearing a speaker for them to be fooled into thinking those effects are real. You cant do that adjusting them on a two dimensional flat plane using headphones. You can listen to music and effects after they are properly set up but trying to tweak them properly is futile. Believe me I spend 10 years recording with headphones doing thousands of recordings and the only ones that sounded close to being real were created mostly through blind luck.

 

You can do EQ and left and right tweaks with headphones, if the phones are high quality and as linear as possible. In your case however an instrument amp doesn't qualify as being anywhere near linear so even there you are wasting your time trying to create presets using headphones. Even the room the amp is in will make a huge difference because different walls at different distances, sound absorbing furniture vs higher reflective are all going to impact the tone. Hopefully you can tweak things fairly generic then use the amps EQ for tweaking the tone in different rooms.

 

Also raise the amp up to ear level when tweaking. If you have the sound bouncing around at floor level you'll never get a good mic balance.