Working Audio Tools: Mixing professionally on headphones with multi award winning Engineer Emrah Celik

July 1, 2023·48 min·4 clips

Award-winning engineer Emrah Celik reveals why he mixes billion-stream hits on headphones, not expensive studio monitors.

Ed is away, and the host wastes no time having fun with it. After the missing co-host bit, he brings in Emre as a close friend and serious Turkish mixing and mastering engineer. The topic is the kind that always starts arguments: mixing professionally on headphones. Emre mostly works that way, so the talk gets past forum slogans and into translation, distortion, and the decisions a mixer makes while working. Planar magnet headphones get the strongest case. Emre says their lower distortion and flatter response make it easier to trust what is happening, instead of pushing too hard on compression. The host grabs onto that because it sounds like the practical answer he wanted from someone who actually mixes records, not another gear-thread opinion. From there, dynamics versus planar turns into real craft talk. Emre argues that planar magnets are less likely to trick a mixer into heavy-handed reverb, transients, compression, limiting, and the rest of the usual trouble. Open-back versus closed-back headphones gets similar treatment. Emre does not buy the rule that serious mixing always has to happen on open backs. If the headphones sound good, closed backs can work. For him, the bigger difference is isolation and outside noise, not automatic professional status. The conversation stays quick and technical. The host keeps asking the questions people throw around online, and Emre answers like someone who has tested the problem under real deadlines. It is nerdy, useful, and pleasantly opinionated. The DistroKid read comes back afterward, but the main point is the headphone argument: trust translation, distortion behavior, and your own working response before trusting blanket rules.

As heard by us

A grounded, engineer-level case for mixing on headphones without treating monitor-speaker tradition as gospel.

Working Audio Tools turns a potentially nerdy headphone debate into a useful working-engineer conversation. Guest Emrah Celik talks through why he favors planar magnetic headphones for mixing: lower distortion, flatter response, and, most practically, a tendency to keep him from…

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Why you'd press play

You want to trust headphones without second-guessing every reverb tail or limiter move.

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