What are the best over ear headphones

What are the best over ear headphones for editing audiobook recordings?

I currently have Audio-technical ATH M30

Thank you,

There’s no such thing as “best”, but “comfort” is essential.
The ATH M30’s should be quite well suited to the job, if you find them comfortable.

Pay attention to the ACX reports (if that’s your vendor). If you get rejected for something you can’t hear, then that’s a problem.

“Can’t you hear that rumble in the background?”

Ummmm. No.

There’s a split between goals. “The Hollywood” headphone is the Sony MDR 7506. Virtually all movie shoots have at least one and usually several. Besides the mechanical tricks (fully articulated pads), they will reveal sound problems usually before anybody else hears them. That’s very different from enjoying a movie for two hours. I can’t listen to 7506s for extended periods and several sound people can’t either.

There’s another problem that has little or nothing to do with headphones. Nobody hears noise. The first time you play back a voice work, you discover that rattly sound your refrigerator makes and (in my case) I can hear take-offs and landings at LAX. Your head tunes out noises like that until they get stuck on a recording.

One poster discovered he needed to present late at night so as not to get traffic noises from his neighborhood.

Quality of voice, unless your microphone is broken or you’re using it wrong, is way down the list.

It’s more of an adventure than you think.

Koz

The ATH M30 is great for what you are doing. They are well priced and although you could spend hundreds more, you would gain very little doing so. One of the most overlooked item with using headphones for editing is making sure that you do not have any sound effects activated during playback via your soundcard. If your system/sound card does have this feature, make sure you select “none” as the default action.

making sure that you do not have any sound effects activated during playback

Totally.

I once got a machine to evaluate that had “Cathedral Effects” running by accident. It failed every sound test “for some reason.”

Koz

Unfortunately this post is attracting far too many spam posts, so I’m reluctantly closing it.