I've spent quite a bit of time looking for a headphone mixing setup for when I'm traveling. I've tried every combination of the following:
Headphone correction:
IK Multimedia ARC 4
Sonarworks SoundID Reference
ToneBoosters Morphit
Speaker simulation:
112db Redline Monitor
Dear Reality DearVR MIX
DOTEC-AUDIO DeeSpeaker
Goodhertz CanOpener Studio
All-In-One:
dSONIQ Realphones
HoRNet VHS
Waves Nx / Abbey Road Studio
For correcting the headphones' EQ profile, Realphones, ARC 4, and Morphit were the best, and performed fairly similarly. I was surprised by how much SoundID under-performed on my Sennheiser HD 650s. I thought it sounded muffled compared to Realphones and ARC. It also sets the output really low and won't let you turn it up. Really strange.
For ARC, you have to create your own measurement, by miking one side of the headphones. You can just leave the mic in one spot for all captures. I wrapped a head-sized ball of T-shirts around the ARC reference mic and placed the headphones over it. The advantage to this is you get a profile of the actual pair of headphones being corrected.
When it comes to speaker simulation, I found plugins that try to 'model' near field monitors in a studio generally all suck. They end up sounding honky and canned. The only thing they accomplish is degrading the sound quality to the point of being useless for critical listening and mixing.
This applies to Realphones, ARC (VIRTUAL MONITORING), DeeSpeaker, SoundID, and Waves. ARC 4 is really good for correcting the headphones, but you should leave "Virtual Monitoring" set to OFF, to skip the speaker simulation. Realphones is the least bad of these at this, and it lets you dial in the amount of Environment/Ambience. You may be able to get away with a little mixed in, so long as you keep it well below 50%. It's still pretty useless and gimmicky, though.
Dear Reality and Waves both sound like you're listening to a far away recording of studio monitors through much crappier speakers. DeeSpeaker is like a muffled mono version of that. And it crashed Studio One. VHS was actually slightly better than any of those 3, but it also crashed Studio One.
For speaker simulation, you really just want to narrow the stereo image of bass frequencies, and leave the sound quality as untouched as possible, because it can only be made worse, not better.
Realphones does this well, and Redline Monitor was OK at it, as was my own homebrew using Studio One's Splitter plugin set to frequency split at 240 Hz with a mono-maker on the low end. But CanOpener Studio really stood out as truly excellent. It was by far the most natural and transparent option, along with Realphones. Neither the sound quality nor the tonal balance were altered by it. It just sounded 'right'. Neither SoundID nor ARC have bass narrowing capabilities built-in.
So, for the absolute best results, I would recommend:
Headphone correction:
IK Multimedia ARC 4
Sonarworks SoundID Reference
ToneBoosters Morphit
Speaker simulation:
112db Redline Monitor
Dear Reality DearVR MIX
DOTEC-AUDIO DeeSpeaker
Goodhertz CanOpener Studio
All-In-One:
dSONIQ Realphones
HoRNet VHS
Waves Nx / Abbey Road Studio
For correcting the headphones' EQ profile, Realphones, ARC 4, and Morphit were the best, and performed fairly similarly. I was surprised by how much SoundID under-performed on my Sennheiser HD 650s. I thought it sounded muffled compared to Realphones and ARC. It also sets the output really low and won't let you turn it up. Really strange.
For ARC, you have to create your own measurement, by miking one side of the headphones. You can just leave the mic in one spot for all captures. I wrapped a head-sized ball of T-shirts around the ARC reference mic and placed the headphones over it. The advantage to this is you get a profile of the actual pair of headphones being corrected.
When it comes to speaker simulation, I found plugins that try to 'model' near field monitors in a studio generally all suck. They end up sounding honky and canned. The only thing they accomplish is degrading the sound quality to the point of being useless for critical listening and mixing.
This applies to Realphones, ARC (VIRTUAL MONITORING), DeeSpeaker, SoundID, and Waves. ARC 4 is really good for correcting the headphones, but you should leave "Virtual Monitoring" set to OFF, to skip the speaker simulation. Realphones is the least bad of these at this, and it lets you dial in the amount of Environment/Ambience. You may be able to get away with a little mixed in, so long as you keep it well below 50%. It's still pretty useless and gimmicky, though.
Dear Reality and Waves both sound like you're listening to a far away recording of studio monitors through much crappier speakers. DeeSpeaker is like a muffled mono version of that. And it crashed Studio One. VHS was actually slightly better than any of those 3, but it also crashed Studio One.
For speaker simulation, you really just want to narrow the stereo image of bass frequencies, and leave the sound quality as untouched as possible, because it can only be made worse, not better.
Realphones does this well, and Redline Monitor was OK at it, as was my own homebrew using Studio One's Splitter plugin set to frequency split at 240 Hz with a mono-maker on the low end. But CanOpener Studio really stood out as truly excellent. It was by far the most natural and transparent option, along with Realphones. Neither the sound quality nor the tonal balance were altered by it. It just sounded 'right'. Neither SoundID nor ARC have bass narrowing capabilities built-in.
So, for the absolute best results, I would recommend:
- CanOpener Studio + ARC 4 with your own profile.
You can of course also correct your studio monitors+room with ARC. - Next best would be CanOpener Studio + Morphit.
Good choice to save a little bit of money and hassle if you have no use for ARC's room correction. - Realphones is close behind these options.
It has the benefit of being a complete solution on its own. - None of the others are recommended.
Statistics: Posted by jamcat — Thu Dec 19, 2024 2:28 pm