There has been some debate about whether headphones or loudspeakers are the more effective monitoring system. However, there has been little discussion of the effectiveness of the two mediums in the context of mixing and music production tasks. The purpose of this study was to examine how the monitoring systems influenced users’ performance in production tasks using both mediums. An experiment was designed, in which the subject was asked to match the boost level of a given frequency band in a reference recording until the boost sounded identical to the reference. A group of six audio engineering graduate students completed the experiment using headphones and loudspeakers. Subjects’ adjustment levels across eight frequency bands were collected. Results suggest that both monitoring systems were equally effective in the context of adjusting equalizer settings. Future research is called for which will include more subjects with diverse levels of expertise in various production-oriented tasks to better understand the potential effect of each playback system.
