Anyone who has ever tried to get too much low-frequency sound through a portable Bluetooth speaker knows how this happens. As most people in music production know, it's much easier to get low-frequency sound with a larger diaphragm and deeper speakers than with flat little drivers.įor one of my favorite headphones, the Sennheiser HD600, Sonarworks corrects 20-50Hz to 10dB. Small headphone drivers, dynamic or planar magnetic, really can't reproduce sound in the lower frequency spectrum. Looking at the documented frequency response of closed or open-back headphones, it becomes clear: With this in mind, how is it possible that a headphone calibration profile that is suitable and recommended for everyone produces the ideal frequency response in our particular case? From this we can conclude that the presented profiles are somewhat averaged and each pair must be measured individually (by the way, you can buy already calibrated headphones at Sonarworks and look for models and prices on the site).įor comparison, the reference calibration curve provided by Sonarworks for the same headphone looks like this. Not only is there a large discrepancy between the measurements, but there is an even larger discrepancy between the left and right drivers. The graph below shows the change in a pair of Hifiman He400i with ten resets per ear (blue graph - left ear, red - right). Frequency response was measured using a sinusoidal sweep in an anechoic chamber.įor each measurement, the headphones were removed and then put back on the wrong ears. The headphones were placed on a Neumann KU100 dummy head (a kind of crash test dummy with microphones in the ears).
#Sonarworks vs waves nx series
We ran a series of tests to determine the variability in frequency response due to these factors. Additionally, it is a well-recognized fact that even the position of a headphone on the head can result in variability in frequency response, not to mention fluctuations caused by differences in the size of the headphone's ears and the ears of individual headphones Individually. The built-in headphone calibration presets sound like a great tool for the home composer, but as with most digital signal processing, there are almost always additional, potentially unwanted, effects on the digital waveform.
Given the widespread off-target use of music-critical listening rooms, this seems like an attractive alternative to expensive room acoustics.Ĭompared to the Reference 4 room measurement calibration system or Nura's OAE system, these headphone calibration profiles do not require user measurements and therefore do not require an expensive measurement microphone or a complex built-in monitoring system.ĭestroying myths about the "ideally flat curve" and in difficult words - the ideal frequency response Sonarworks Reference 4 offers an additional feature over competing products: an integrated set of calibration profiles for many popular brands of premium and consumer reference headphones.
Manufacturers like Melbourne-based Nura have developed headphones that automatically measure otoacoustic emission (OAE) signals to represent the transfer function of the listener's ear canals (and process the headphones' digital signal).
#Sonarworks vs waves nx software
With this information, the software can feed back directly to the output of the monitoring system to deconstructively superimpose the non-planar frequency response. IK Multimedia's ARC software and Sonarworks' Reference 4 (among others) allow the user to measure with a calibration microphone, which then produces an impulse response representing the spectral attributes of the room. Considering the cost and complexity of acoustically treating studios and, in today's case, non-purpose built mission-critical listening spaces (bedroom studios, etc.), software developers like IK Multimedia and Sonarworks have come up with cool software products to hypothesize the natural color of the acoustic environment.
Over the past decade, impressive advances in DSP (Digital Signal Processing) technology have led to new techniques for controlling the spectral coloring of studio monitors and headphones.
0 kommentar(er)
