Open Back vs Closed Back Headphones: Track on One, Mix on the Other
Buy closed back first. A sealed pair like the Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO 80 ohm gives roughly 15 to 20 dB of passive isolation, which keeps a click track out of an open microphone, and headphone bleed is the one recording mistake that cannot be fixed afterwards. Add an open back pair such as the Beyerdynamic DT 990 PRO or the Sennheiser HD 600 when you start making mix decisions, because an unsealed cup reproduces reverb tails and stereo depth far more honestly.
Definition: A closed back headphone seals the rear of its driver inside a solid cup so sound cannot easily pass in or out, while an open back headphone vents the rear of the driver to the air, which lets the driver breathe and lets the mix leak in both directions.
There is a working rule behind this whole comparison and it is worth stating before any of the detail: you track on closed and you mix on open. Every specification below either supports that rule or explains the handful of cases where it bends. The reason the rule exists is not sound quality, it is permanence. A mix decision made on the wrong headphones can be revised tomorrow. A click track bleeding into a vocal take is in the file forever.
If you are buying one pair and you record anything with a microphone, that is the answer. The rest of this page is why, plus what the open pair gives you that justifies owning two.
What does open back and closed back actually mean?
A headphone driver is a small loudspeaker, and like any loudspeaker it radiates from both sides of the diaphragm. The front wave goes into your ear. What the designer does with the rear wave is the entire distinction.
A closed back design traps the rear wave inside a sealed cup. That gives you isolation in both directions and it also creates an acoustic problem: a small sealed volume of air behind a moving diaphragm behaves like a spring, and the cup itself has resonances. The designer has to tune around that, which is why closed backs so often have a characteristic bass lift and a slightly hard upper midrange.
An open back design vents the rear through a grille or a perforated plate. The driver loads into effectively open air, so there is no trapped spring, far less internal resonance, and the decay of a note is governed by the driver rather than by the box around it. The cost is total: no isolation at all, in either direction. A Sennheiser HD 600 in a quiet room is audible to somebody standing next to you at conversational listening level.
Semi-open designs exist and sit between the two, usually closer to open than the marketing implies. If a manufacturer calls something semi-open, assume it will bleed.
How bad is headphone bleed, really?
Bad enough that it is the single most common reason an otherwise good home take gets rerecorded. Here is the chain. A singer wants the click and the backing loud enough to perform against, which in practice means somewhere around 85 to 95 dB SPL at the ear. An open back cup radiates a substantial fraction of that into the room. The vocal microphone is eight to twelve inches away and, if it is a cardioid condenser aimed at the mouth, the headphones on the singer's head are roughly at the edge of the pickup pattern, not in its null.
The result usually sits far down in level, which is exactly why people miss it while tracking. It survives happily under a dense chorus. Then you get to the mix, you solo the verse, you pull the band down for the last line, you add a compressor with 8 dB of gain reduction and a fast release, and a ghost of the click comes up with the breath noise. Automation cannot fix it, because the bleed and the voice occupy the same track at the same time. Gating cannot fix it, because it is loudest exactly when the singer is singing.
Three practical mitigations, in order of how much they buy you: use a closed pair; turn the headphone mix down and replace the missing loudness by removing the click entirely for the last take; and use a click sound with no high frequency content, because a wood block click at 4 kHz bleeds through a cup far more readily than a low, soft one. A Four channel headphone amplifier also helps here, oddly enough, because a properly driven pair at a sane volume beats a weak output being pushed to its limit.
I lost most of a session to this once and the failure mode was not what I expected. It was not the click. It was the reverb on the singer's cue mix. I had put a big plate on the headphone feed to make her more comfortable, which is a good idea and I still do it. She was wearing an open pair. The plate leaked back into the microphone, so the dry vocal I printed already had a quiet, slightly delayed version of itself smeared behind it. It sounded fine soloed and it would not sit in the track no matter what I did, and it took me two days to work out why. Cue reverb goes in the headphone mix only, and the headphones have to be sealed for that to be true.
How much isolation does a closed pair actually give?
Less than people assume, and unevenly across the spectrum. A well sealed circumaural closed back gives roughly 15 to 20 dB of passive attenuation, and nearly all of it lives above 500 Hz. Below about 200 Hz a sealed cup is close to transparent, because long wavelengths pass through the cup material and around your head rather than being blocked by it.
That is the same physics that governs a wall, and it is worth connecting the two ideas: mass blocks high frequencies easily and low frequencies only with great difficulty, which is the whole subject of our treatment versus soundproofing comparison. A headphone cup weighs a few ounces, so expect what a few ounces can do.
Practically: closed backs are plenty for keeping a click and a backing track out of a vocal microphone, which is the job. They are not enough to sit three feet from a drummer, where the only real answer is in-ear monitors. And the seal matters enormously. Glasses arms break the seal against the head, and a broken seal on a closed back costs both the isolation and a good 5 to 10 dB of the bass you were hearing a minute ago.
Which type tells you the truth about bass?
Neither, but they lie differently, and the open back lie is easier to learn.
Closed backs produce bass by pressurising a sealed volume against your ear, which means the low end you hear is a function of how well the pad is sealing at that moment. Move your jaw, wear glasses, have a different head shape than the designer assumed, and the response below 100 Hz changes. Many closed models are also voiced with a deliberate low shelf because it makes them more pleasant on a long tracking day. The Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO, 80 ohm and the Audio-Technica ATH-M50x both carry a lift you have to learn to discount, and the Sony MDR-7506 answers the same question by being noticeably bright rather than bassy.
Open backs cannot pressurise anything, so they roll off in the bottom octave rather than boosting it. But the roll off is smooth and it is the same every time you put them on, which is worth more than extension. The other half of the advantage is decay: with no trapped air behind the driver, a reverb tail stops when the reverb stops rather than when the cup finishes ringing. That is why reverb amount, delay feedback and stereo placement are so much easier to judge on an open pair. Our guide to mixing on headphones goes into how to compensate for the missing bottom octave.
What do the specifications say?
The three numbers worth reading on a headphone spec sheet are the type, the impedance and the sensitivity, and the last two only matter together. Sensitivity quoted per milliwatt and sensitivity quoted per volt are not comparable figures, which is a genuine trap. The voltage column below is the useful one: it is what your headphone output has to deliver to reach a working monitoring level.
| Model | Type | Impedance | Sensitivity | Volts for 100 dB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO | Closed | 80 ohm | 96 dB/mW | 0.45 V |
| Beyerdynamic DT 990 PRO | Open | 250 ohm | 96 dB/mW | 0.79 V |
| Sennheiser HD 600 | Open | 300 ohm | 97 dB/V | 1.41 V |
| Audio-Technica ATH-M50x | Closed | 38 ohm | 99 dB/mW | 0.22 V |
| Sony MDR-7506 | Closed | 63 ohm | 106 dB/mW | 0.13 V |
Read the right hand column as a warning about the open backs. The Sennheiser HD 600 needs 1.41 V rms for a 100 dB average and 4.47 V for 110 dB peaks, which is more than plenty of interface headphone outputs will produce. When an output runs out of voltage the failure is not obvious quietness, it is a thin, flat, uninvolving sound with no dynamics, and people blame the headphones. The Sony MDR-7506 at the other end of the table needs a tenth of a volt and will play loudly from a phone.
This is also the argument for buying the 80 ohm version of a Beyerdynamic rather than the 250 ohm version if it is going straight into an interface. The 250 ohm variants are genuinely better behaved when properly driven, and genuinely worse when they are not.
Which is more comfortable over a long session?
Open backs, and it is not close. Two reasons, one obvious and one not.
The obvious one is heat. A sealed cup traps warm air against your ear and there is nowhere for it to go, which is why a four hour edit in closed backs ends with sweat and a headache. Velour pads help, leatherette pads make it worse and seal better, and that tradeoff is real: the pad that isolates best is the pad that is least comfortable.
The less obvious one is pressure. A sealed volume of air in front of your eardrum means every low frequency excursion of the driver physically pushes on it. Some listeners feel that as a dull ache or a sense of fullness after an hour, entirely separate from loudness. Open backs remove it completely, which is a large part of why engineers who mix all day mix on open pairs and why the Sennheiser HD 600 has survived three decades of fashion.
Whichever you choose, take the headphones off every hour. Ear fatigue makes you turn things up, turning things up makes you fatigued faster, and the mix decisions from hour four of a headphone session are the ones you will revisit.
How do they compare head to head?
| Attribute | Closed back | Open back | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leakage into a microphone | Low | High | Closed |
| Passive isolation | 15 to 20 dB | Close to 0 dB | Closed |
| Bass extension | Deeper, seal dependent | Rolls off, consistent | Draw |
| Decay and reverb tails | Smeared by cup resonance | Clean | Open |
| Stereo depth | Inside the head | Wider, more layered | Open |
| Comfort over four hours | Hot, pressurised | Cool, unpressurised | Open |
| Use next to a loud source | Workable | Unusable | Closed |
| Typical drive requirement | 0.13 to 0.45 V | 0.79 to 4.5 V | Closed |
| Cost of getting it wrong | A harder mix | A ruined take | Closed |
When does the rule bend?
Three cases, and they are worth knowing because they save money.
If nothing you record uses a microphone, buy open and skip the closed pair entirely. A producer working in the box with software instruments and samples has no bleed path, so the only argument for closed backs is other people in the house, which is a real argument in an apartment but has nothing to do with recording.
If your monitoring room is genuinely bad, headphones stop being the second reference and become the first. In that situation an open pair plus one careful check in a car is a more reliable path to a translating mix than trusting a set of monitors sitting in a null. Run your dimensions through the room mode calculator before you conclude the speakers are the problem, because they usually are not.
If you are recording other people, buy two or three cheap closed pairs before you buy one good open pair. A guest player with no headphones will use whatever is on the desk, and a session stops dead over a missing second pair far more often than it suffers from a mediocre one. The specific models at each price are covered in the tracking headphone roundup and the mixing headphone roundup.
Related comparisons and tools
- Five inch vs eight inch monitors: the speaker side of the same monitoring decision
- Condenser vs dynamic microphone: the microphone that will or will not hear your headphone bleed
- How to mix on headphones: the workflow that makes a headphone mix translate
- Best studio headphones for mixing: specific open back picks by budget
- Beyerdynamic DT 900 PRO X review: the open back an ordinary interface can actually drive
- Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO review: the closed back tracking standard, and which impedance to buy
- Sennheiser HD 600 review: the midrange reference, and the amplifier it needs
Frequently asked questions
Can I use open back headphones for recording vocals?
Not with a microphone open in the same room. An open back cup radiates the headphone mix into the air by design, and a cardioid condenser eight inches from the singer will capture the click track and the backing at a level you cannot remove later. It survives a dense chorus and it ruins a quiet verse, a fade or an a cappella intro. Use a closed back pair for tracking and save the open pair for mixing.
How much isolation do closed back headphones actually give?
Roughly 15 to 20 dB of passive attenuation, and almost all of it above 500 Hz. Below about 200 Hz a sealed cup does very little, which is why a loud kick drum or a bass amp still comes through clearly. That is enough to keep a click out of a vocal microphone and nowhere near enough to record next to a drummer without in-ear monitors. Isolation and soundproofing follow the same physics: mass, seal and low frequency leakage.
Why do open back headphones sound wider?
Because there is no sealed cavity behind the driver. A closed cup traps the rear wave, which creates pressure buildup and cup resonances that smear decay and exaggerate certain bass regions. Venting the rear lets the driver load into open air, so the decay of a reverb tail is reproduced more honestly and stereo information stops sounding like it is happening inside your skull. That honesty about depth is the reason mix decisions are easier on open backs.
Do I need a headphone amplifier for 250 ohm headphones?
Usually yes if you want real peaks. The Beyerdynamic DT 990 PRO in its 250 ohm version needs about 0.79 volts rms to reach 100 dB SPL, and the Sennheiser HD 600 at 300 ohms needs about 1.41 volts for the same level and 4.47 volts for 110 dB peaks. Many interface headphone outputs run out of voltage before that, so the sound gets thin and lifeless rather than obviously quiet. Low impedance versions avoid the problem.
Is it safe to mix entirely on headphones?
It is workable and it is now common, but check the result somewhere else before you call it finished. Headphones remove the room, which is a real advantage in an untreated space, and they also remove the crosstalk between your ears that speakers provide, so stereo width and bass level are the two things that translate worst. Mix on an open back pair, reference on a small speaker or in a car, and adjust the low end from that.
If I can only buy one pair, which should it be?
Closed back. The reasoning is asymmetric: mixing on a closed pair is harder but recoverable, while tracking with an open pair prints headphone bleed into the file permanently. Buy something like the Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO in the 80 ohm version, learn how it exaggerates the low end and the top, and add an open pair later when mix decisions rather than take quality become the thing slowing you down.
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