The result is immediate, apparent and eye-opening. The reason for this is because the app also measures how your speakers interact with the room that they’re in, so you need to do the measuring yourself. If you want to use it with your speaker monitors, you’ll need to create a profile for them yourself using Sonarworks Reference 4 plus a measurement microphone available directly from Sonarworks (a US$69 purchase). You can also use Sonarworks Reference 4 with your speaker monitors, though you’ll need to purchase the Studio Edition plus a measurement microphone because you’ll be doing the monitor profiling yourself. The result in theory is a flatter sounding headphone. By measure and mapping out its characteristics, Sonarworks is then able to determine the peaks and dips in the frequency response of a particular model, and it then applies the correction within the software. The way it works is the app first creates a profile of a specific headphone. Sonarworks Reference 4 aims to disrupt all of that: for a couple of hundred dollars, the app claims to flatten the frequency response of headphones and speakers that are compatible with it. Generally, the more expensive you go, the flatter the response though there is no totally flat playback system – at least not one that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars set in a room costing even more. But that’s exactly what studio-grade gear is supposed to do: By keeping these biases and frequency bumps to a minimum, studio engineers and producers are able to hear an accurate representation of the sound coming out of their DAW. It may seem like a paradox then, that more expensive studio monitor speakers and, to a certain extent, headphones aim for a flatter, more “sterile” response that tries to suck out any hype or excitement from the frequency range. These characteristics are what sweeten the sound and make casual listening a more pleasurable experience. All headphones and speakers have a “signature” sound: whether that’s a bump in the low end for more bass (as is the case with DJ headphones) or a dip in the mids and a spike in the highs and lows for that “hi-fi” hyped sound (eg cheaper / consumer grade gear).
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