What about the kitchen test? We work hard on our music, and we want it to sound great everywhere. But how do you do that if you don’t have a consistent and pristine mixing environment?

Two ingredients can help: the Sennheiser HD 490 PRO Plus Open-Back Headphones and Dear Reality’s dearVR MIX-SE plugin, which comes FREE with the headphones.

Affiliate link: https://bit.ly/3PDIzF8

0:00 Intro
1:38 What to look for in mixing headphones
3:31 Unboxing the Sennheiser HD 490 PRO Plus Open-Back Headphones
6:02 Why open-back headphones are better for mixing
9:46 Inside the Dear Reality dearVR MIX-SE plugin
19:58 Final thoughts on the Sennheiser HD 490 PRO Plus Open-Back Headphones and Dear Reality dearVR MIX-SE plugin

As much as I’m sure we’d all love to listen to music under the perfect conditions—a state-of-the-art hi-fi system or stellar open-back headphones in a controlled environment—the truth is that much of the music we create is consumed in unideal conditions.

Cars, grocery stores, sporting events—these are all places where you WANT your music to be heard. But how do you know your mix, which sounds great in your Sennheiser HD 490 PRO Plus open-back headphones, is also going to sound good to someone streaming their Spotify playlists while cooking up some hot dish for their family in the kitchen?

The answer still starts with these Sennheiser headphones.

Open-back headphones like the Sennheiser HD 490 PRO Plus provide a more natural, live-room feel and are generally considered to reproduce music more accurately. And that’s what you want for critical listening scenarios like mixing your music.

The HD 490 Pro Plus headphones have a super wide, nearly 3D soundstage and quote “ultra-precise localization.” In other words, you’ll be able to hear nuances and finer details you might miss with other headphones. And you’ll enjoy one of the best soundstages you can get.

These headphones also have the neutral, uncolored frequency response you want in critical listening environments, but this doesn’t mean they have anemic low end. Sennheiser credits their quote innovative low-frequency cylinder system for their clear and defined low-end reproduction.

Obviously, I can’t show you how these headphones sound. All I can really do is tell you about the features and benefits and whether or not I like them.

But what I can show you is the sweet software it comes with.

I'm talking about the Dear Reality dearVR MIX-SE plugin. I had the pleasure of trying this software, which is free with the Sennheiser HD 490 PRO Plus headphones, at NAMM and was really impressed. With this software, you can turn your headphones into physical mixing environments. This is great for when you, like a lot of us who record and mix at home, don’t have great physical environments with expensive acoustic paneling.

Ultimately, I can see this being a really helpful software, and a big bonus for picking up these headphones. It’s probably best for people who are more experienced than I am in mixing—I don’t do a ton of mixing, so I’m probably never going to need that consistency of a mixing room that I know inside and out. However, I know that this is the kind of thing that really matters to pros who do this all the time.

But, more than anything, it kind of pumped me up to imagine hearing this song in kitchens, cars, and even stadiums. It’s one thing to hear your song in headphones, and I know that a lot of us listen on headphones all the time, myself included, but the magic in music is when it’s played in real spaces.

It’s choosing music that fits the mood while you’re cooking a meal to impress your date, blasting a Tidal playlist in your car on a roadtrip with a friend, pulling up YouTube on the Apple TV and watching music videos, walk-up music over arena speakers at a baseball game. These are the real experiences we have with music every day, and they’re the kinds of experiences we imagine people having with OUR music—if we’re lucky.

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