subsekt

Anyone here onto this already ? I just bought the headphone plugin and my god what a difference it is to mix on headphones with it.

http://sonarworks.com/

It's 2 different plugins really, although they use the same interface.

Today I decided to give their speaker measurement software a try and I must say I was pretty skeptical about it cause sound will still be bouncing of surfaces even though I am "Eq'ing" the room.

I have to say it really does an amazing job of flattening out the frequency response of my room, I have no acoustic treatment in here what so ever (no space).

Just by a few simple measurements and the room is actually a lot less "boomy", judging bass is a lot less troublesome.

The plugin also simulates different speakers and headphones, very nice to be able to check how your mix translates without even leaving your room.

Highly recommend checking this software out if you have trouble with your room or want to mix more accurately in your cans.

I'm very curious about the headphone plugin (HD Reference). Have you tried this as well?

The headphone plugin is amazing, all of the sudden you can clearly hear if your bass and kick are overlapping to bad or if your kick is to boomy, how loud your high end should be, panning is now not shooting in the dark. This software has revolutionized my workflow as my current situation does not allow for acoustic treatment so I use headphones a lot and this I find makes a world of difference, for me at least.

It's also really just 1 plugin but you can pay for both options (speakers/headphones) then you can switch between monitors and headphones within the plugin, real nice for checking your mix on your cans.

yep i bought this early last year i think, couldn't live without it

i use it for my AKG 240s phones - always hated the sound of them (although loved their comfort) - now they are used very frequently!

it's the 1 plugin i have to remove if i want to use an external source (ie my eurorack) - it introduces a lot of latency

It's good stuff, I use it for my cans.

Mattias wrote:It's good stuff, I use it for my cans.

I saw in the gear thread, you have Sennheiser HD650s, right? I have the same phones, so I might give this thing a try in the future..

Will demo this out and see if it improves my DT880's experience. Hopefully it plays nice with redline monitor.

I've read (possibly on Gearslutz) about people using the Headphone plugin alongside Waves NX, so I expect it will work fine with redline monitor (same idea).

Planar wrote:Will demo this out and see if it improves my DT880's experience. Hopefully it plays nice with redline monitor.

I don`t think you`ll need to use redline monitor, I think this thing does phantom centre etc, I could be wrong.


I love producing in headphones, at night, with the sound enveloping me, so I`m going to give this a try.
I use Etymotic ER4`s which don`t need any correction, but to shake things up, and after a huge amount of trying out products and sending them back, I settled on AKG 701`s as my alternative phones, they sound closest to full and neutral out of everything I tried in the 100-500 quid region, after burn in. Will get the demo of this software and see how it it compares to proper speaker response in the mastering room.

I've been reading around a little today and I don't think it does the redline thing, I think it's just an EQ profile. But I'm not 100% sure. Let me know if you try it out, I won't get around to demoing it for a few days.

BTW, it's miles cheaper to buy this from JRR Shop than directly from Sonarworks- it's about £50 instead of £70.

Planar wrote:I've been reading around a little today and I don't think it does the redline thing, I think it's just an EQ profile. But I'm not 100% sure. Let me know if you try it out, I won't get around to demoing it for a few days.

BTW, it's miles cheaper to buy this from JRR Shop than directly from Sonarworks- it's about £50 instead of £70.

good call, I love to save money

Also, have you tried TBIsone, I`ve found it works better than the Redline as you can select head size and ear canal size (I have small canals), I end up with a better stereo balance.
http://www.toneboosters.com/tb-isone/

dubdub wrote:

Mattias wrote:It's good stuff, I use it for my cans.

I saw in the gear thread, you have Sennheiser HD650s, right? I have the same phones, so I might give this thing a try in the future..

I changed them to the HD600 but with the 650 cable. Need a good headphone amp though.

I'm on the shittiest hotel WIFI ever, so can't really investigate myself...
JRR offers a sonarworks/waves NX bundle, but it's a bit unclear to me. don't these plugs do about the same? or are they complementary?

I think they're complimentary, but as I said above, it's really not clear at all. If it does end up being an EQ preset, I'll probably EQ match the demo version in pro-q 2 with white noise and save myself £50.

Just given the demo a shot. I'm not able to use my 880's at the moment so I'll reserve any judgement on whether it improves monitoring or not. The change it makes is very audible when using white noise. I can't find any speaker simulation at all, so it just seems to apply an EQ curve.

I managed to use Pro-q 2's EQ match and got a result I can't hear any difference between when I A/B it with the Sonarworks. So I'll give it a couple of sessions with the Sonarworks plugin and compare it to my new Pro-q preset, but right now I don't see any reason to buy it; I think if you're just after the average headphone correction then you can get this end result for free if you have the tools. If it actually improves monitoring (no reason to suspect it doesn't) then it looks like the value for money is in the room correction tools and the bespoke analysis they'll do to your headphones for the extra fee.

So download the demo and copy the curves for my akg's then. Surely it can't be that simple can it?

Mattias wrote: I changed them to the HD600 but with the 650 cable. Need a good headphone amp though.

How do you find the sub-bass response on the HD600s?

Lost to the Void wrote:So download the demo and copy the curves for my akg's then. Surely it can't be that simple can it?

I think it is. The clever bit here isn't the end result, but the measurement to begin with, and for the average response of the headphones you're getting this out of the box. I wouldn't want to match it manually but it's just a very expensive EQ preset. With 10 EQ bands for the auto EQ match I can't tell the difference with the current phones I have access to. Mmultianalyzer on both channels also results in spectra that match up very, very closely (as you can overlay them with this plugin). I'll experiment with more bands with proper headphones before my demo expires.

The real problem I have with this is that I don't know if the result is going to be better. My headphones are the flattest monitoring I have, so I don't know whether to trust the Sonarworks EQ curve or not, but my results are in line with reviews I read today- duller sound etc. I would values someone else's opinion on this really, especially if someone uses properly amp'ed 880's like I do and they use headphones primarily. I think it may come down to trying it out on a few mixes and A/B'ing with and without, then seeing what seems to translate better.

Well I`ll be testing the results against my mastering monitors, so I`ll be putting this shit through a hard test.