If I can add a point to this:two shoes wrote: ↑22 Dec 2018Imo you're better off with a small set of full range nearfields turned down low than the best headphones ever made, at least for stereo mixing and two track work. Yes, you'll get more detail out of the headphones and hear things you'd probably miss at first with monitors, but your sacrificing the stereo soundstage completely and I have yet to hear a plausible explanation of how one is supposed to create a good stereo mix with no stereo image Maybe if you have years of experience going back and forth between monitors and headphones on the same mixes cause you're a full-time engineer and you have a really good handle on how something is going to translate from headphones to stereo, but I don't know of anyone in this category who would try to mix on headphones or recommend it to anyone either.
There are plugins out there designed to make headphones behave more like monitors for this reason, including something called HM-1 or something like that in the RE format, but these have never worked well for me. I think you'll get more mileage in the long run from learning to mix on a small set of nearfields at low volume (i'm assuming volume is the issue that's driving you to try and mix on headphones in the first place) even ones in the same price rang as a good set of headphones.
All that said, there is the question of how much sense it makes to mix everything in stereo in a world full of people listening on earbuds or in cars - the rare listener who's sitting down in the sweet spot of a good set of loudspeakers probably isn't streaming your latest headphone mix from Spotify or Youtube in the firstplace. I get this argument and I'm all for discussions of the relative merits of mono vs stereo vs quadraphonic, etc in a world where streaming low bit rate audio to shitty earbuds is the dominant listening paradigm, but that's a different question than should you try to mix in stereo on headphones - the answer to that question is and always has been an emphatic no.
So unless you've already abandoned the idea of mixing in stereo (in which case i want to hear more about what you're doing instead and why) my two cents is get the best pair of nearfields you can and turn them down low enough so they don't wake the baby or bother the neighbors or whatever it is. Get good at that and when you do have the chance to turn them up to normal listening levels you will feel like you have hearing superpowers.
You can position sounds in 3D with in-ears in a way that can sound so real, it fools you. In-ears and speakers stereo field don't translate the same way. They are different media, different experiences.