Virtual Monitor Pro Feature Request

Hi Ashley Stockton Glad to hear you like our new product and what it offers! 

The SoundID binaural in-ear microphone has been designed specifically for the measurement process with Virtual Monitoring PRO and it is not possible to create headphone calibration profiles with it. We do not recommend using this microphone for other purposes. 

While the Individual Headphone Calibration service is currently not available, we do intend to bring the service back at some point. I can't provide a timeline at this point, though. 

Hey Marco,

Am I missing something here but is this just a refusal to entertain this idea or an actual physical limitation?  As I understand it, when you calibrate headphones you put a mic in between them and play test tones, pretty much identical to what Virtual Monitor Pro does with speakers and then the headphones themselves.  Surely it is not beyond the realms of possibility to use the VMP ear mics to listen to a test tone and then calculate the calibration file required to make the flattest response possible.  If I am missing something here please let me know.

Thanks,

Ashley

Think you are missing a trick here, if you provided the ability to create a flat response in headphones through the use of the ear mics, this would be a system wide equalisation, it wouldn't just be flattening the response of the headphones but it would also take any colour that the amp driving the headphones might add out of the equation.  This is probably a more compelling USP than making your headphones sound like your studio imo.

Marco any thoughts?

Ashley Stockton thanks for sharing your thoughts! 

Your thinking is absolutely on the right track. If we have binaural in-ear mics, it’s natural to imagine extending their use to creating personal headphone profiles. It would be a valuable feature.

However, there are a couple of technical limitations that make this difficult today:

• VM PRO doesn’t measure absolute headphone response. It only measures relative differences between your room and your headphones. There’s no true “flat” reference in that process, so the data can’t be used to generate a calibrated headphone profile on its own. You would need a reliable third reference. While we can imagine using your calibrated speakers or headphones for that purpose, those still have their own error margins. Some setups would produce decent results, others would not. Achieving the consistency and accuracy needed for a real product feature is a challenge here.
• Sonarworks’ headphone profiling method isn’t based on simple binaural recordings. While other companies may rely on straightforward binaural measurements, our profiling process uses a proprietary method with several components that an in-ear mic alone can’t capture. Even if the profile were meant for just one specific user, important parts of the process would still be missing.

So in short, your idea makes sense conceptually, but technically, it’s not yet feasible to deliver the level of quality and consistency we’d expect from an official feature. It also isn’t something that could just be toggled on; it would require a significant development effort to solve these limitations.

We really appreciate the suggestion, and you’re not alone - we’ve received similar requests, and they’re absolutely on our radar.

Thanks again for the thoughtful input!

It’s all good, Ashley Stockton, we genuinely appreciate the creative thinking! 😊

The limitations I mentioned above still apply. Even though the concept sounds straightforward, the process doesn’t translate into a workable or reliable solution in the way you’re imagining (if only it were that simple!).

So for now, it’s not something we can implement as proposed, but the idea is appreciated nonetheless. Thanks again for the thoughtful discussion!