Boxed myself in with cans now I need to find a matching sound

[homegrownbuddy]

Like the title says I spent the last two years stuck in my little studio apartment with tight noise regulations. So I built, tweaked and tuned all of my sets and snaps to what I could hear in my DT770'S (250 ohm) Now I with weekend bookings starting to return I am needing to find some good frfr monitors that pretty much match what the 770's put out. I don't have time to go back and redo all of the work I did with the day job making me go back to the physical office 10 hours a day.  I doubt a real "perfect" match exists but I really need to get as close as possible. Any ideas? 

[codamedia]

As you said... you boxed yourself in (through no fault of your own)...

Ultimately, you want to setup your tones on your LIVE FRFR at gig volume, but as you say, it's not possible in your situation. 

 

Given your situation, I would suggest you buy the best FRFR you can afford that also suits your needs! That FRFR will likely have a few EQ settings (flat, monitor, enhanced, house, etc... etc..).... start with those to get one as close to the headphone sound as possible. If there aren't any presets.... adjust the EQ on the FRFR to get it as close as possible to the headphones. 

 

If that alone does not accomplish the goal you can apply the global EQ to the output feeding the FRFR and shape the tone for a given room. This is no different than dialing in an amps EQ on a gig and will apply to all presets. When you get back home, make sure the Global EQ is not assigned to the headphones and/or turn it off completely. 

 

[cruisinon2]

5 hours ago, homegrownbuddy said:

Like the title says I spent the last two years stuck in my little studio apartment with tight noise regulations. So I built, tweaked and tuned all of my sets and snaps to what I could hear in my DT770'S (250 ohm) Now I with weekend bookings starting to return I am needing to find some good frfr monitors that pretty much match what the 770's put out. I don't have time to go back and redo all of the work I did with the day job making me go back to the physical office 10 hours a day.  I doubt a real "perfect" match exists but I really need to get as close as possible. Any ideas? 

 

I sympathize with your plight, but while the shortcut you're looking for has been begged for a thousand times over, it doesn't exist. The problem is not the headphones, and switching to a different pair will not help you. No pair of headphones will ever sound the same as an FRFR speaker blaring away at stage volume, at a listening position way off-axis, at some significant distance from your ears. These are night and day scenarios. So in a nutshell, you have two problems:  Different output devices, coupled with a significant difference in volume.

 

Unless you're insane or already deaf, your stage volume will be considerably louder than whatever you're pumping through your cans. The perceived loudness of different frequencies varies significantly with volume... it's a limitation of human perception, and there's nothing you can do about it...we're all in the same boat. (Google the Fletcher-Munson curve if you're bored, and you can read all about it).

 

You have EQ-ing to do. Period. You can't "gear" your way out of this with a pair of magic bullet headphones. Patches must be dialed in for their specific intended use. This means at or very close to the volume at which they will  be used, and at the very least monitored through the same type of output device(s). If you don't want to waste the rest of the band's time at rehearsal, book the room for an hour before everybody else gets there and tweak away... I've done it before, and you should be able to get reasonably close to what you want, with some minor adjustments being inevitable once you're in the mix... that's what the global EQ is for, not the wholesale transformation of multiple patches from one usage scenario to another. However you choose to go about it, dialing everything in at volume is unavoidable. End of story. 

 

If you want to minimize aggravation going forward, I suggest keeping different set lists containing the same patches, pre-tweaked for different uses... headphones, studio monitors, live, etc etc...I've done it for years, and it works. Otherwise you'll be in a constant state of tweaking everything back and forth, depending on where you are. (And in my experience it won't be as simple as turning the global EQ on or off. Any one EQ curve is not likely to be sufficient to apply to every patch you have, particularly when it comes to clean vs dirty tones. They often need very different treatments, but I digress). Yes, it's more work up front... but you only have to do it once. After a while, regardless of how a patch was created, you'll get to know what EQ  changes will need to be made to adapt it to another scenario, and the process will become much less time consuming... but you'll never eliminate the grunt work altogether... welcome to the wonderful world of modeling.

[DunedinDragon]

Ultimately, it wouldn't do any good if you did get FRFR speakers that would match your DT770's since you're going to be playing live through a PA system and NONE of them will are going to sound like your DT770s.  That's why getting a FRFR speaker that's consistent with what PA's use is the most accurate way of getting your sound where you want it to be...and that's not for you, that's for the audience.