Under PressureĪs with Sonarworks, it's possible to apply less than 100 percent correction, but there are also a couple of other controls relating to headphone correction that are unique to Realphones: Presence and Pressure. Pricing varies depending on how many of these you need access to, with the 'full fat' Ultimate Pack offering unlimited choice and the most affordable Lite Pack including only generic Open and Closed profiles, rather than anything specific to a particular headphone model. At the time of writing, the list of headphones for which a generic Realphones profile is available isn't quite as comprehensive as the Sonarworks equivalent, but it's still pretty impressive, clocking in at over 90 models. Again, this mirrors the identical service provided by Sonarworks. If you want correction that's accurate to more than ☓dB or so, you can send your specific pair of headphones to their labs, where they will generate a custom measurement file for you.
The 'system-wide' version of Realphones includes a built-in music player (lower left).Like Sonarworks, dSONIQ supply generic correction profiles for various popular models of headphones these are averaged from measurements taken from multiple test samples, so reflect the broad character of each model. I could wish that they had gone still further and made the system-wide version a plug‑in host in its own right, so that you could use your own choice of analysis tools, but this would be a huge development job. As well as the expected mono button, these include the option to audition only the Sides signal, separate left and right channel mutes, channel swapping, right-channel polarity flipping and a three-band DJ-style crossover that can be used to solo or mute the low, mid and high frequency bands. The system-wide utility has a built-in music player that could be used to house your mix references, and all versions boast a comprehensive set of mix checking tools. There's no Sonarworks-style visual indication of what EQ curve is being applied to your headphones but, to compensate, Realphones does have one or two nice features that aren't available in Reference. With the plug‑in version, of course, you need to take care to avoid inadvertently bouncing mixes through Realphones.
#SONARWORKS VS WAVES NX SOFTWARE#
This latter interposes itself between your operating system and audio interface, so it looks to music software like a stereo output device, and is certainly the easiest solution if you never need to switch to loudspeakers.
#SONARWORKS VS WAVES NX MAC#
Like Reference, Realphones is available both as a plug‑in (in VST, AAX and Mac AU versions) and as a 'system-wide' utility. I'm not sure whether Sonarworks will feel more flattered or alarmed by the similarities between Reference and Realphones, but these similarities are too obvious to go unnoticed. So you could think of Realphones as combining the functionality of Reference with that of Waves' Nx (albeit without the head-tracking), or the old Focusrite VRM Box.
But, unlike Reference, it doesn't just correct for the deficiencies of your headphones: it includes optional binaural processing that attempts to recreate the experience of listening on loudspeakers in a control room. Whereas Reference is designed to work equally well with headphones and loudspeaker-based monitoring systems, Realphones is targeted purely at the former. Realphones, from Russian developers dSONIQ, closely resembles Sonarworks Reference in many ways, but there's one key difference.
Sonarworks' Reference system has thus cornered a large part of the market for headphone correction, and Toneboosters' Morphit was the only alternative I knew of. The same principles can be applied to headphone monitoring - arguably, with fewer compromises - but there seems to be much less choice.
There are now many 'room correction' systems, which will measure the acoustics of your control room and attempt to flatten them out in software. Realphones aims to put all the software tools you need for perfect headphone monitoring in one neat package.