Foo Fighters’ Studio 606 upgrades with AKG
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The recording space and headquarters to the Grammy Award-winning band Foo Fighters, Studio 606 specialises in analogue and direct-to-tape recording methods, the studio also houses the custom Neve 8028 recording console from Sound City, the studio where countless artists recorded some of their most notable work.
As the majority of bands who record at Studio 606 prefer to track while playing live in the same room, the studio required high-quality closed-back headphones capable of providing sufficient noise isolation and preventing audio bleed. Additionally, to ensure accurate sound for recording and mixing, the studio’s engineers needed headphones with a balanced and uncoloured frequency response. To meet these requirements, the studio purchased eight pairs of AKG K371 headphones.
“Usually the musicians we record are sitting in the room with the drummer, so it's loud,” said Oliver Roman, audio engineer, Studio 606. “It's a huge live room and there's a lot of reflections, so you're sitting in there just trying to combat the sounds of cymbals and stuff. We had these headphones that were great for a long time, but they were starting to fall apart and weren’t the best at isolating. If somebody was blasting a click track or the music in their headphones, you could hear it throughout the whole room, which caused a lot of sound bleed. We were looking to upgrade, and the AKG K371 isolates really well while still letting you feel the liveliness of the room.”
“You have drummers under 10 or 15 microphones, and since they want to blast the click as much as possible, you’ll hear the click every time they stop playing,” explained Roman. “The K371s have been pretty good at masking that and having a nice balance between isolation and the ability to feel like you're still playing live. A lot of bands that come in here want to feel like they're not wearing headphones, and these ones are so comfortable that you forget you’re even wearing them.”
