Sonarworks will also produce custom filters for your specific headphones-if you don’t mind shipping them to the company’s facility in Latvia. Send your headphones in for a custom filter Sonarworks sent me two pairs of factory-calibrated headphones for testing.

The company promises accuracy of ☓dB for each headphone model its software supports. Slight inconsistencies in materials in and construction can result in minor sonic differences in the otherwise identical make and model of headphone, so when Sonarworks adds support for a new model, its filter is based on the averaged results of several pairs. The Sonarworks True-Fi database supports headphones priced less than $100 all the way up to high-end models such as the Focal Clear.

True-Fi therefore also takes into account the listener’s perception of sound, adjusting its target curve based on your age and gender. As we age, we lose our ability to hear high frequencies. True-Fi doesn’t just compensate for a headphone’s frequency response shortcomings, like an EQ package would. Sean Olive and his colleagues at Harman International, which suggests otherwise. It’s tempting to think that headphones should exhibit ruler-flat frequency response, from the bottom of the frequency spectrum to the top, but I’ll point you to the pioneering work of Dr. The goal here is to make each headphone’s final sound match their studio reference standard as closely as physically possible. Once this analysis is complete, the team applies the appropriate inverse curve to address those frequency peaks and dips. In an ongoing effort, Sonarworks measures and analyzes each supported headphones’ frequency response, looking for its shortcomings. The typical curve is riddled with peaks and valleys, indicating that the drivers inside the headphone will overemphasize some frequencies and under-emphasize others, coloring the audio reproduction compared to what was recorded in the studio.

If you’ve ever examined a frequency-response chart, you’ll note that it is not ruler flat. Sonarworks’ True-Fi functions in a similar vein to today’s top room-correction packages, such as Audyssey, Anthem ARC, Dirac, and Trinnov.

Sonarworks trial