I Used Sony's Mixing Headphones for Video Editing — And They Made More Sense Than I Expected

The Sony MDR-MV1 wasn't really made for someone sitting in Premiere Pro cutting together a YouTube video. Sony calls these studio monitor headphones and primarily pitches them to people mixing and mastering stereo and spatial audio. But video editing involves a fair bit of audio work too, and that's where I ended up using the MDR-MV1 most.

I've edited a bunch of videos with these headphones over the past few weeks, sometimes wearing them for almost an entire working day, and somewhere along the way they quietly became part of my editing setup. Not because they make everything sound spectacular. In fact, that's almost the opposite of what I want while editing.

It's because I can hear what I'm working with properly, and I can keep them on my head for hours without getting annoyed by them.

The MDR-MV1 is surprisingly easy to wear all day

The first thing that surprised me about the MDR-MV1 was just how light they are. They weigh 223 grams without the cable, which is pretty impressive for a full-sized pair of over-ear headphones. But the number didn't really mean much to me until I started wearing them through longer edits.

I've had days where the MDR-MV1 stayed on my head for close to eight hours, obviously with the usual breaks in between, and fatigue was never really an issue.

The ear cushions are soft and, just as importantly, the headphones don't clamp down particularly hard on my head. My ears weren't getting uncomfortable after a couple of hours, nor was I constantly taking the headphones off because things were getting sweaty inside the cups. That matters a lot more to me than it probably would if I were buying headphones purely for listening to music for an hour every evening.

There are also a few small design touches I've grown to appreciate. The headband has numbered adjustment levels on both sides, so once I figured out that level five worked best for me, I could simply keep both sides there instead of eyeballing whether the headphones were sitting evenly.

The earcups swivel as well. When I wanted to stop editing for a few minutes, I could pull the headphones down and leave them sitting flat around my neck rather than throwing them onto the desk every time.

The MDR-MV1 is also fairly easy to drive, with a 24-ohm impedance, so you don't necessarily need a dedicated headphone amp just to use them. The supplied 2.5-metre cable ends in a 6.3mm plug, although Sony includes a 3.5mm adapter as well, which made it easy enough to work into my desktop setup.

The open-back design makes a lot of sense when you're editing

Comfort is what made me keep wearing the MDR-MV1. The sound is what made me keep using them for editing.

These are open-back headphones and compared to the closed-back headphones I normally use, sound feels like it has much more room to breathe. Everything isn't being squeezed into the space directly beside my ears. There's a wider sense of space, and when you've got dialogue, background music and other audio elements running together in a timeline, that presentation is really useful.

The separation is probably what I appreciated most. Dialogue remained easy to pick out even with music sitting underneath it. That made it easier for me to judge whether the music was creeping a little too high, whether a voiceover needed adjusting, or whether two parts of an edit were sounding noticeably different from each other.

Sony designed these headphones for mixing and mastering, with an emphasis on accurately reproducing individual sound elements and spatial information. I obviously wasn't mastering an album with them, but I was doing a smaller version of the same job every time I tried to get dialogue, music, and effects to sit nicely together.

The open-back design comes with a compromise, though. You don't get that same sealed-in bass experience you'd normally associate with a good closed-back pair, and the MDR-MV1 also does very little to isolate you from the room around you. Closed-back headphones generally have an advantage when it comes to isolation and that harder-hitting sense of bass.

That said, I wouldn't call the MDR-MV1 bass-light. There's still a decent amount of weight down low for an open-back headphone.

The MDR-MV1 probably isn't the pair I'd reach for when I just want to put on some music and disappear into it. But that's also not really what Sony built it for. After spending so many hours editing with it, I think I finally understand who these headphones are for. They're the kind you leave plugged into your PC, put on when there's work to be done, and eventually stop thinking about altogether. For me, that's probably the best compliment I can give them.