Why? Your headphones have a slight bass boost and a roll of at the highs. Too your surprise it sounds horrible! The lows are too weak and the highs hurt in your ears. Later, you go up to a local DJ and ask him to play your mix. Imagine you mix a track on your headphones and it sounds great to your ears. Similarly, you don’t want to wear coloured headphones while mixing. Would you wear coloured glasses while painting a picture? No, of course not. As a mixing engineer or music producers working with the actual sound is essential. That too can lead to an imbalance in sound.Ī flat frequency response curve means that the sound is neutral or in other words, that which you hear is as close to the actual sound as possible. To give a pleasant bass experience nonetheless, some headphone producers boost the bass response accordingly.Īs some headphones fail to reproduce the lowest bass frequencies, the manufacturer compensates by boosting the higher bass frequencies. On headphones we don’t feel the bass as much as we do with a good set of speakers. To counterbalance that phenomenon many headphone manufactures work with a high-frequency roll-off.Īnother reason is the simple fact that bass sells. Consequently, the closer you are to a speaker the louder the higher frequencies. High frequencies, while traveling through the air, lose energy faster compared to low frequencies. There are a variety of reasons to why that is:įor once, the proximity of headphones to your ear lead to an increase in perceived high frequencies. If you look at the frequency response chart for typical headphones you come to realise that they are everything but flat.