Every few months someone asks me whether their good headphones are good enough to work on. It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that the two kinds of headphones are built to do opposite jobs, and the difference shows up in the work rather than in the listening.
A consumer headphone is voiced. The maker decides what pleasant sounds like, lifts the low end, often lifts the top, and tunes toward a target curve that research says most listeners prefer. That is not a flaw. It is the product. You are buying a finished opinion about music, and most of them are very good at it.
A studio headphone is trying to be boring. The goal is a response flat enough that what you hear is what is on the file, so that a decision you make at midnight survives being played somewhere else. Boring is the feature. The first hour on a flat pair after years of a voiced pair is usually disappointing, and that disappointment is the point: the bass you liked was being added for you.
The practical difference is what happens to your decisions. On a voiced headphone the low end arrives already flattered, so you stop adding weight before the track actually has any, and you discover the problem on a laptop speaker. The reverse happens at the top. A bright headphone makes you dull things that were never bright, and the mix lands soft everywhere else.
Open or closed matters as much as the tuning. Open backs let the driver breathe and generally image better, which makes them easier to judge depth on, and they leak sound in both directions, so they are no good next to a live microphone. Closed backs isolate, which is what you want while tracking, at the cost of a low end that interacts with the seal on your own head. If you wear glasses, that seal changes, and so does the bass. That is not a metaphor. Break the seal a millimeter and you can lose the bottom octave.
None of this makes a consumer headphone useless for work. It makes it a reference. Most of the people who will hear your piece are listening on something voiced, in a car, or through a phone, so checking there is not cheating. It is the last step rather than the first. Judge on something flat, then confirm on something popular, then confirm again on something bad, because something bad is where most listening happens.
The one thing a headphone of any kind cannot do is tell you about your room, which is why anything with a serious low end still gets checked on monitors, and why a crossfeed plugin is worth trying if headphones are all you have. Crossfeed bleeds a little of each channel into the other, the way your head does, and it makes a wide mix stop sounding like two separate performances strapped to your skull.
The short version: work on something flat, check on something voiced, and know which one you have on. A headphone that makes everything sound good is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is the problem.
