Studio monitors vs headphones
Which to mix on, and when. A decision table for small and untreated rooms, what each one hides, and how to use both without fooling yourself.
More guides coming
Room treatment on a small budget, choosing an audio interface, and a first home-recording setup are next. Tell us which decision you are stuck on and it moves up the queue.
Two kinds of guide
Buying guides take a category — monitors, headphones, interfaces, a first bass — and work through it by budget and by use case. They name a specific recommendation and explain the reasoning, rather than listing ten products and calling them all excellent. Where the honest answer is “keep what you have”, that is the answer.
Listening guides do the same job for recorded music: a route into a genre, an era or an artist’s catalogue, with a short reason for every entry and a sensible starting point rather than a canonical top hundred.
What is being written first
- Studio monitors versus headphones for mixing in an untreated room — published.
- What a first home-recording setup actually needs, and what can wait a year.
- Room treatment on a small budget: what changes the sound and what only looks the part.
- Choosing an audio interface by input count, latency and driver reliability rather than by preamp marketing.
- Ambient and atmospheric music: an essential listening route for newcomers.
How guides are put together
Recommendations come from testing and from documented specifications, not from affiliate commission rates — there are currently no affiliate links on this site at all, as recorded in the disclosure. Prices are European street prices with the date attached, because a guide without a date is a guide you cannot trust. Guides are revisited when the market moves, and the “last updated” line at the top of each one tells you when that last happened.
Where a guide leans on a single product, the detailed testing lives in the matching review. The standards behind both are in the editorial policy.