I am actually somewhat unsure whether this qualifies as a feature request or is simply a logical error. I mean, you’ve been in this business for a long time, and headphone measurements and target curves have been part of your domain from the very beginning. Therefore, you should be aware that measurements above 4kHz with GRAS or HATS rigs are simply very unreliable (see Toole’s / Harman studies). So, it’s puzzling to me why you were cautious enough to implement limits and deactivate the correction for the ends of the frequency range, but tied it to the built-in EQ. If you currently use the limit to deactivate the correction above 5kHz, then the EQ and custom target curve are also deactivated from that frequency range onwards. I did extensive loopback tests to get measurable data for this. This is completely inexplicable and nonsensical to me. Often, only light shelf filters are needed in the treble for TOFL headphones. There is a lot of debating in the science community if peaks and valleys above 4Khz should be touched at all due to the flaws we have in the current rigs and a vast variety of ear shapes. So in other words, if your correction is not appropriate or too drastic, the user should still be able to tame or boost the treble with EQ filters available in the Target EQ.
Likewise, I don’t understand why you cannot deactivate the lower bass limit for headphones. The forced high-pass filter smears the timing and unnecessarily alters the phase to a degree. This is appropriate for the speaker correction for sure but makes things worse then better on headphones. Planars or Orthos are well able to play down to 20Hz with ease. This does not destroy drivers. Headphone drivers operate based on the minimum phase principle, so the additional latency of a linear phase algorithm plus the pre-ringing is simply unnecessary to overcome issues.
Currently, I cannot use SoundID for my headphones and have reverted back to using Kirchhoff EQ connected via VirtualCable/Pedalboard2. It’s not a big deal in a DAW environment but quite annoying in the OS operation, especially since I specifically chose Sonarworks due to the headphone component amidst the vast selection of DRC offerings nowadays. However, this component is not usable in its current state.
So, in short, I would like to request the following reasonable changes:
1. Decouple the target curve EQ from the correction limits feature.
2. Allow deactivation of the target curve’s high-pass and low-pass filters.
3. Additionally, it would be great if the tilt curve could be reintroduced in the EQ.
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