[SwellJoe]

"What people aren't getting in this thread is that modern pop and hip hop is engineered to be played on systems with a lot of bass (sub woofers). Ironically this forces the engineer to limit the amount of bass in the mix, so there some truth to the claim that a headphone with exaggerated bass will produce a sound closer to the intention of the artist."

Not true. Engineers working in pop and hip hop mix primarily with the understanding that the first listen by a consumer will be on the radio in their car. This has several built-in assumptions, and the expectation of lots of sub bass being reproduce-able is not among them. Sales of records are heavily affected by how good the song sounds on the radio, and most people have the audio equipment that came with their car.

Not only that, the next stage of music marketing evolution is earbuds. So, if one were to mix for the next most popular method of getting your music into the ears of consumers, you'd mix with the expectation of being heard first through cheap earbuds.

Engineers mix knowing that their tracks will be played on a wide variety of equipment, from very bad to very good. The more accurate their equipment is, the better they'll be able to serve all of those listeners. But, the best results will always come from having accurate equipment for playing it back.

I'm also an audio engineer, and I, too, find the $300 beats headphones to be an abomination to both good sense and good taste. But, I disagree with your suggestion that engineers are mixing with less bass because subwoofers exist.

[bherms]

Yep, mix with best headphones/monitors you can find, master with cheap earbuds.

[SwellJoe]

Good mastering requires accurate monitors, as well. Every stage gets tested in various types of speakers and playback devices and formats (so, the engineer checks it out in their car on the way to the studio, on their iPod, on their laptop, etc., as does the mastering engineer). There is no stage where the engineer (recording or mastering) doesn't want an accurate monitoring setup, however. And, there is no stage where checking the mix against various listening environments is a bad idea. High dollar recordings are listened to hundreds of times by at least a half dozen people on the way to being shipped to listeners.

[b1daly]

I'm probably commenting more on my experience, which does not extend to actual hits. But I am called on to emulate the sound. It has been a struggle to get the bass right, often I find if I mix to have perceptually a lot of bass on, let's say small computer speakers, it's easy to have blown out bass on a system with a sub.

The bottom line is that virtually all playback systems that exist in the real world are nothing remotely like an accurate studio monitor. The engineer is always concerned with how the mix translates to different systems. In this process accurate monitoring is profoundly helpful, but that doesn't mean the engineer expects any listeners to have such a system.

Bass enhanced headphones like Beats have become yet another listening environment to be considered.