Once again, listening through a flatter response can help you make more accurate mix decisions without accidentally compensating for the room’s issues. It takes over 30 measurements from around the listening position, then spits out a unique file that you can load into the standalone app or plug-in versions.

Setup is still a smooth and easy-to-follow process that should take around 20 minutes. The Reference Measure app remains largely the same with some minor cosmetic tweaks. You can also purchase the mic separately for £69 or use any other measurement mic. If you opt for the full version, it comes with Sonarworks’ XREF20 microphone with a unique calibration profile for added accuracy. You may prefer one over the other, but that's about it.Alongside using Reference for headphone listening, you can also use it to calibrate your room and speakers, although you’ll need a special measurement microphone for this. In audio, in a bedroom production setting, it doesn't make a huge difference whether you listen to your monitoring as it sounds out of the box, or with some EQ curve applied to it. But that's a context where it makes sense to standardize everything: So that you can move from display to display without having to worry about different color balances being a thing. That's not because the makers don't care about color balance, that's just the nature of making different products with different components and materials: you get different results.Įven within a same graphic design studio, people need to calibrate their color balance despite everyone using the exact same brand and model of display. All displays, professional or not have slightly different color balances. Imagine if instead of audio monitoring, it was displays. What Sonarworks is trying to do is kind of 'standardize' all headphones/speakers. All the sounds we hear are shaped by imperfect acoustics.

And far more importantly, we don't listen to anything ever on perfect flatness, not even in the natural world. No headphones or speakers can produce a perfectly flat curve. In cases like the Beyerdynamics DT 770 or the Sony MDR-7056, they are indeed made to highlight certain parts because their original intent was for studio tracking.īut 'flat' is a myth.

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