Comparing Headphone EQ Software....Should you even use it?

[@ketarii]

This gentlemen drops alot of gems 💎 🙏🏽

[@tomdaigon8707]

I think the most effective way to use Sonarwerks is to buy one of their headphones which they custom measure and make a eq curve for. Its important to me that when Im mixing that my eq environment is flat. In this more controlled scientific approach, I get the confidence my mix will not be tainted by the room or the untreated headphones qualities.

[@leamantech]

Agreed, and thanks for your comment. Slate has that option with their VSX product also. I was hoping to shed some light onto what is going on behind the scenes and how different the outcomes can be. You still really don’t know what you are getting with any of them unless you measure them yourself. You make an excellent point that what we want is to have the most neutral reference possible with headphones and our rooms, but it seems there is more than one idea of what neutral is. Instead of being frustrated by the fact that we can’t settle on the gold standard house curve for rooms or headphones, I am inspired by the reality that when a talented engineer is involved, who takes the time to listen to reference material in a strange environment, they can produce a translatable mix. I worked with a guy - Rex Ray - who mixed some Outlaws records when I was still a kid (1970s). He played those for me when I was in my 30s and they sound great. He drug around a pair of JBL monitors and perched them as best he could in whatever studio he happened to be in. Back in the 70s studio design was all over the place. Reference headphones didn’t exist and yet some of those guys produced great results and more importantly the most powerful audio processor around (ear-brain) made it to where even though they didn’t always have the ideal setup they could deliver consistent results. I love the technology and all of the efficiency and possibilities it can afford us, but at the end of the day it is up to the engineer to figure out how to use all of that tech to the best effect. Thanks again for adding to the conversation.

[@GermoStaalfeldt]

@@leamantech So slate can do custom EQ for our own headphones?

[@jcpuga]

Morphit actually has a setting where you can choose Harman Curve. It’s under correction. You can choose what it is emulating.

[@leamantech]

Thanks for the feedback. Indeed they do, but all of these tools gave me different results using the Harman Curve. That should not be the case. I tried not to single out any product as bad. It is incumbent on us as end users to understand what these products are doing. The point of something like this for me would be to get me to a sonically neutral industry standard reference point. If they all apply a different filter set to get me there, with all other things being equal, how do I know which one, if any, got me to where I am supposed to be going? I appreciate you commenting on my video.

[@jcpuga]

@@leamantech Whatever helps you make the right decisions IMHO

[@messibeaucoup]

Do I understand it right that it is as simple as throwing the impulse response for my headphone model in a convolution reverb on the master bus in my daw, and voila I have the most possible neutral frequency response that my headphones could have while producing and mixing?! And I’m a bit confused what ‘neutral’ means here. The Harman curve looks so ‘Hifi’ to me, more like end consumer full-warm-hifi sound with lots of bass and shining highs, wouldn’t an ACTUAL neutral, flat frequency response be better suited for mixing to be able to hear what is really happening..? Am I getting something wrong? I always struggle to grasp technical stuff, but I still found your video very informative and insightful, so thanks for that and have a nice day, Cheers David

[@leamantech]

You answered your own question without realizing it. Even neutral is subjective. It’s been a while but I think I hinted at this in the video. We can adapt to a wide variety of responses (within certain limits) and they will seem neutral to us after some time. What a target curve represents is what is preferred among a group of test subjects. I have no problem with that. You can’t just have the impulse response of your headphones in the convolution. You need the delta (difference) between your headphone response and the target curve. You can make this in REW.

[@messibeaucoup]

@@leamantech thanks for your reply! I think I understand your answer from a consumer point of view, then neutral = common taste. But from a mixing engineers point of view I would assume that there is something like an actual technically perfect neutral that is aimed at to be able to hear ‘the truth’, apart from taste. I interpret the impulse responses on the autoeq GitHub to actually be the delta, so then it should work. I will try… Thanks for the hint to REW , and thanks for taking the time to answer!

[@BurningBushPedagogy]

What is really happenning ie Flat, on paper seem right, but in life what you think is really happening is usually a lie. go to the sea, and watch a boat sail away and soon it seems to disappear, but that is with your naked eyes, the same boat that you cant see, if you take a zoom camera or binoculars, you will still the boat clear still moving, but with eyes you dont see it al all; This is fact, the boat didnt go under a curving water as we being lied to and we normalized that since everyone accept that water curve. But a lie. In the way, a totally flat line or more or less straight line in mixing is not what you need for making a great mix, because those who will hear it back also dont listen on a flat eq system. you need listen with an close what to what most people listen. Again if you highs are all clean neutral, when you micing or adjusting hi hats vocals shakers etc, you might think your high have been eq d perfect but when someone with earpods, galaxy buds car stereo listens they will find out that, you could have pushed the highs a bit more, or if for example with most smiley face eq curve everywhere, the vocals that sound normal with your flat respond would sound harsh or somehow sibilant when they listened with system that are brighter than yours. So you need to listen or mix with hype here are there to be close to reality of what speakers and headphones sound like; This is not rocket science but they make it seem.

[@alinpricop8439]

I'm lazy and use Wavelet for my needs. I manually edit the txt file from the AutoEQ function with 120-ish bands and altering that EQ with the 9-band one on top depending on my daily mood.

[@leamantech]

For listening pleasure adjusting the eq to taste is a perfectly sensible thing to do. For mixing or mastering the goal is accuracy and the confidence that gives you in how well your mix will translate to other listening environments. It is not a perfect science, but we can apply some method to get consistent results once we train our brain to our more accurate environment. The downside to this is that some things may not be as pleasurable to listen to as they once were. There are many problems, and many ways to approach them.

[@alinpricop8439]

@@leamantech That's the thing, I'm having it easy, I'm at the "re-mastering" phase, where all the work is done and I just chip in with my personal preference. The only thing I might be missing is driver setup and quality, otherwise, I am enjoying the perfect sound to my ears (ex: FH3 and Dioko with EQ).

[@leamantech]

@@alinpricop8439 There is no wrong way to get the sound you want :) I bet that will drive some people crazy; what do you think? I have often thought about re-mastering all of my favorite music just for myself. I will never do it because of time. Much music, especially if it is from different genres, does not play nicely on a system optimized for a different genre, so I would actually eq the files and perhaps even adjust the dynamics for each album or song to get them all a bit more consistent. Of course adjusting your headphone volume and eq on the fly is the same thing. I do that in my truck a lot. But when I am checking a mix or master, I will reset to factory defaults to hear what most people would hear if they played my track in that vehicle.

[@conebread58]

How did you get to the page with the target curves for your headphones and the page with the IR?

[@Reverend11dMEOW]

Sonarworks has less than zero support, especially when one has been partially blinded by bear spray in one eye, combined with Windows 10 stock setting of 150% font size default for 4K monitors making the opening program screen shove the very first button mostly South off-screen, which they kept insisting, Accessibility is not what we do, no matter how many times I said, "150% font size is default and your devs have not tested 4K monitors on Windows 10." then they refused refund.

[@leamantech]

That stinks. Sonarworks is making money hand over fist at the moment. On the one hand, they have plenty of money to refund you without it hurting their bottom line, on the other hand they have no incentive to care if you're happy because of their immense popularity and celebrity engineer endorsements. The world is often a difficult place. I am using Windows 10 with (2) 5120x1440 monitors and did not have problems with scaling or the software going off screen. I only got the demo to make the video, as there is really no value in it for me. You can use alt plus the left or right arrow button to snap the window to the left or right half of your monitor. I am able to drag windows below my taskbar (bottom) and if I release the mouse button, they are gone. I can get them back using the method above. Perhaps that can help you also. PS I hope you got the bear!

[@Reverend11dMEOW]

it sucks royal, but that is the last time I trust or shop there along with adding adding Acronis backup to cover my bum better in the blank future. That drive had all my sd, microsd, usb flash, usb hard drives everything take care.

[@DugiDevetCarabolium]

IS there any EQ like APO that have dark theme? i like apo, but is terrible in the night that white blast in the eyes...

[@alinpricop8439]

Auto-eq-Harman doesn't work for me (wish it did), neither the "make a headphone sound like another" trick, tried to make it work with the Github's CSV library. It's only good for finding out the balance between the lows-mids-highs and getting a basis to EQ further. Maybe I own lower end stuff that has a higher variation between samples (Dioko, FH3, Samsung Buds Pro, ATH-M20x). Also messing with the treble and air with Auto-eq is a big mistake from these types of software, even with smoothening in that area. EQ-ing yourself if you know what you're doing after years of trial and error is the way. Buying something with a DSP is also cool (like the Quarks DSP), since it's cheaper, not having to engineering the driver itself to sound great, costing thousands of dollars.

[@leamantech]

Agree, you can't make one headphone sound like another. Maybe it could work if you were trying to match the same model to account for manufacturing variances. There is much more going on than frequency response, and that is before we account for, seal, pinna variation, etc. I appreciate you comments. It's always good to hear what others experience is.

[@GTSongwriter]

You said a lot of nothing. I was interested in what you recommended, but instead you just talk about technologies without saying much about anything.

[@leamantech]

Thanks for watching and for leaving a comment. I am sorry you did not find the video helpful.

[@BurningBushPedagogy]

You could have said which you prefer or atleast some final thoughts, all these techy details is not needed for us to know all the nitty gritty to use it, you know but should have told us what to do use, even guide to do specific move towards getting headphones eqd whichever one of the ones out there. because after watching its not leading to do something; you see. practicality is very good even without knoing the whole nerdy stuffs, you can drive a car without knowing about how car actually works. just to use it. thanks just feedback here