If You Have Headphone Monitors, Do you Still Need Actual Monitors?

I am confused about this whole monitor thing (I'm just a beginner).

If I have a pair of headphone monitors, do I still need to have actual monitors? When I'm working on my music, I always wear my headphones anyway because I want to be completley sunk into the music and hear everything and I never use my regular speakers. So what I want to know is- do headphone monitors work as well as actual ones or not? If anything, I would think headphones would be better since it's right on top of your ears. And how much of a difference do you think monitors make from regular speakers?

Please keep in mind that I am by no means a professional and if I did get monitors, I would not spend more than $150 on them (I was looking at some M-Audio ones for $99).

It all depends on where you are in your music career
If you are a beginner, just learning the ins and out of DAW's you may not need them for now,
but when you want to achieve a decent mix that sounds good on other speaker systems,
you'll find your headphone mixes generally don't cut it.
HERE is another thread on the same subject.

RLD

I always check mixes on headphones, but I'd never trust something totally done on headphones. You have to spend some real cash just to get headphones that are flat.

There are two basic problems mixing with headphones.

1. The stereo imaging (difference between left and right channels) is unrealistic in headphones. If you picture a normal monitor setup, some of the sounds from the right speaker will go into both ears and the same for the left. What ends up happening is that you will listen in your heaphones and think that the mix is really great with lots of separation and depth, but when you listen on regular speakers it sounds like everything is mushed up in the middle. Even though many people listen to music almost exclusively through headphones now, the circuits in the players are designed to make up for the unrealistic channel separation in headphones. You can get a sense of it by changing the Speaker Settings in the Sounds and Audio Devices control panel applet on your PC.

2. Except for a few headphone models (one from Audio Technica and one from AKG are highly recommended by forum members - don't remember the exact model #s), headphones have serious deficiencies at reproducing the entire frequency spectrum accurately. Many headphones will artificially augment the bass frequencies to make up for the small size of the speaker itself. Also most headphones will have "holes" at frequencies that would sound harsh to the ears if they were present. This means that your mix may contain a lot of these frequencies that you will not hear in the headphones. When you play it on regular speakers it is very difficult to listen to.

If you are new to audio mixing, your ears may not have "learned" to hear these things easily. I would continue using the headphones until you can really hear the difference.

I'm going to disagree with Yoe, you use whatever you have and can afford. I live in Tokyo and so I simply cannot use my monitor speakers most of the time. Yes monitors speakers are better, but so is a $200 and hour professional studio. Audio technica ATH-M40fs are well thought of on this forum and have a very flat response; you can do a good job with them.

Brett