While I was listening to music on the bus to my day job, a strange thought entered my mind...Who invented headphones? And did the invention of headphones cause musicians to write music differently? AS a musician I can tell you one of the best ways to edit music or listen to a new mix of a song is to listen to it in headphones.
So I went on the seemingly all encompassing information hub Wikipedia.org and looked up headphones.
Turns out headphones were created before amplifiers by a man named Nathaniel Baldwin and were pretty much the only way to listen to electronic audio signals before amps. And they were often so poorly grounded in the early days that a person could shock themselves when attempting to adjust the headphones on their head for comfort while audio was playing.
Pretty interesting.
So I ask my fellow musicians or sound engineers, do you mix with headphones on or when panning audio do you do it with the idea of how it will sound IN headphones?
Comment below. I'm curious.
PS. Nathaniel Baldwin could be the subject of a whole 'nother blog post. Quite an interesting man. But I'll just let you read his Wikipedia page.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Baldwin
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