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. Destroying myths about the 'ideally flat curve' and in difficult words - the ideal frequency response 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.

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). 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.

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