Sound difference between headphones and 1/4" output

[maurus]

The reason for the difference is physics.

To produce sound in a headphone is so very different from producing sound in a room through speakers that it's extremely hard, you could say impossible, to get the "same" result. Near-field listening helps, but only so far. With acoustic piano sounds, covering a very wide frequency range, the problem is bigger than with other sounds such as human voices that are more limited in range. Room resonances will always interfere in small or medium sized rooms, especially in the bass range, and they are much more difficult to control than with headphones. In real life, acoustic pianos are large bodies in vibration; it's simply not possible to generate the same vibration in a room's air with two (comparatively) tiny speakers.

Even with headphones I find it quite hard to fine-tune the EQ to get the most "natural" sound in APs.

PS. In my experience the two main but difficult things here are to avoid boomy resonances in the bass, and particular spikes in the high treble that make the sound harsh. I'd rather give up a bit on the lowest frequencies than having a boomy bass, and I'd rather give up a bit in clarity than listening to a harsh, metallic piano. Go for a smooth middle and low treble range.

[SteveNordP3]

Headphones hug your ears and provide a different experience. Still, you mention not panning - I’d recommend panning L fully left and R fully right and see if it doesn’t make a difference for you.

[harmonizer]

You wrote that you are using Sennheiser headphones. You did not say which model, but in general they make high quality headphones.
As a general rule of thumb, a pair of good quality headphones will create sound quality better than a pair of speakers with quality amplification, even if the speakers and their amplification cost 4 times as much as the headphones.
So I would expect a pair of Sennheiser headphones to sound much better than any pair of speakers I could afford.

[sweelinck]

The issues with the monitor sound are most likely being caused by room effects— phase-shifted reflections off walls and/or ceiling with respect to highs and mids, and room resonance (standing waves) with respect to bass. Unless you have a subwoofer, or the large 3-way Genelec monitors, it is unlikely that bass buildup is the problem.

I would usually prefer more modestly priced monitors in a treated room to more expensive monitors in an untreated room.

The output stage of the headphone amp in the keyboard likely is slightly noisier than the output stage of the line level outputs. The headphone op-amps in Nord keyboards seem to be more or less on par with what you would get in an average mixer of reasonably good quality.

[hanlalo]

Hi everyone, i have the same problem using my nord stage 3, but when connecting my headphones to the audio interface (the latest apogee Duet)
the sound loses a lot of quality

[FZiegler]

Hi,

you might start with the beginning of the thread: panning the two channels left and right.

[FZiegler]

Phantom power is off? Don't know if this could change anything.