Something About Your Headphones and Sonarworks True-Fi.
A short disclaimer: This article is written to familiarize readers primarily with some headphone-music-listening-related issues. It is also a small introduction to our app — Sonarworks True-Fi. Hence, if you are an experienced music connoisseur, understand the main principles of sound, and such thing as Frequency Response also sounds familiar to you (and probably causes light trembling when you hear it) you can easily skip the first part of the article and move to the paragraph where I describe True-Fi, how it works, and how it can be used.
For whom is this article
This article is written for beginning music lovers — people who just started their journey to the sound perfection. At some point, after spending hours listening tracks, a soon-to-become-an-audiophile decides that it is a time for an upgrade. The road to an outstanding listening experience is long, dark and full of mysteries. In the beginning, you probably discover a mind-blowing flow of various not-seen-before devices and apps, all promising to deliver perfect never-seen-before sound quality. And after reading a bunch of articles and guides, you, most probably, will notice that reaching perfect sound it is not only about buying the most expensive headphones. As always, things are a little bit more complicated.
There various audio file formats (MP3 is not a thing anymore!) offering the highest bit rate, various equalizers for sound balancing, amplifiers (definitely must-have for every self-respecting audiophile!), and headphones, which, although being the not only important thing, also highly matter. The last one is the particularly difficult question — which model should you choose? Different models for different purposes? And which purpose do you have? Or you should just buy the most expensive par of cans? — as you see, it is really difficult not to get lost in this ocean of information and simply decide what to do next.
Music quality
The main thing here is to understand and define what music technical quality exactly means. Or, speaking about headphones, what is the criteria based on which we can distinguish good headphones from bad headphones. And I promise, after reading this article, things will get much easier.
Generally, we can say that the good mix is the one where you as a listener can perceive and grasp every music instrument: percussion, guitars, etc. intended by the musician. And this is exactly the thing most associated with music quality. Although it might be that the track was initially poorly produced on the studio, however, taking into consideration the high-quality devices as well as the number of technical professionals, involved into the production process, it hardly is the case. Almost always the problem arises from the listener’s side.
It might be disrupted file with low bit rate (also a rear case, and even if so, the impact is not so significant) but in the majority of cases, it is something wrong with playback device — most probably, headphones. Therefore, we conclude, that high-quality sound basically means hearing the track in the same way as the artist heard in his studio, or in other words, get studio sound on your headphones. Next question to be asked — how come differences might arise? And now we arrive at something that is called a Frequency Response.
Frequency Response
Simply saying, it is how well your headphones can play the sound of various frequencies. If decomposing a track, we will see approximately following picture — low frequency is a bass, high frequency are, for instance, Hi-hats, or, let’s say, violins, and there is something in the middle. Musicians know, that to make a balanced track you need to put something on each part of the frequency spectrum.
The problem is that although on the studio the artist can hear all the spectrum of frequencies at almost the same volume level — due to expensive speakers and properly set room, your headphones won’t be able to provide such good Frequency Response — and as a result you definitely are going to hear some frequencies being louder and some much quieter.
One more problem is that different headphone models have different Frequency Response. Some models tend to make bass louder, having lower volume level on the middle, some show sort-of-OK bass, but have a problem while delivering high frequencies. This happens due to analog limitations — different headphones have different construction, different assembling and as a result Frequency, Response may vary between two headphones within one particular model.
Of course, producers are aware of this situation — the increase in sound quality definitely took place over the last decades. Also, there are some headphone models which almost arrived at the well-balanced flat sound. But what if I tell you, that there is an option to get perfectly balanced and flat sound to almost any pair of cans?
Sonarworks True-Fi
At Sonarworks we are passionate about sound and our goal is to ensure that everybody hears the music in a way it’s meant to be. Our mission is to introduce the new digital sound standard hat delivers the same accurate studio reference sound on all existing speakers and headphones — Sonarworks SR. And True-Fi is the first step by which we want to be sure that listeners can hear the same mix on their headphones as the artists on their studios.
What we do is measure acoustic profiles of various headphone models getting a very detailed picture of how each and every model alters the sound — we call it to create a headphone digital profile. The measurement is done using unique and proprietary measurement tools, which results in getting a pretty accurate profile for each headphone model.
After getting a headphone profile the sound is adjusted for each headphone model using a proprietary audio engine to correct for any sound problems and bring the sound back to the studio reference — basically make all the frequencies sound at the same volume level.
True-Fi is our app, which stores all the profiles and adjusts and balances sound delivering it through your headphones directly to your ears. Of course, since sound improvement is based on each model’s profiles, it won’t be suitable for all of them, however right now it is able to work with more than 200 headphone profiles and the list is being updated. It could be a good tool for all passionate music lovers -suitable for headphones of any price category. The cool thing is that it literally lets you enjoy better sound on the headphones you already have. The app is optimized both for Mac and Windows and mobile app is coming really soon.
If it sounds interesting to you, you can get the app here. There also more information available about Sonarworks and True-Fi itself, as well as full list of supported headphones. Everybody deserves to enjoy the purest sound, and get perfect listening experience. So click the link, download True-Fi, chose your headphone model and happy listening!
