Other features include input and output meters, a toggle to reduce the output based on the curve to avoid clipping, and a Simulation section that lets you select from four other types of headphones and two speakers, although this feels a little underdeveloped. There’s also a low-shelf filter, and a tilt to further tweak the final output to your liking, and a wet/dry knob that allows you to dial in varying amounts of correction, allowing you to pull it back to something more subtle. Luckily, the filter used is pretty transparent and you can choose from linear phase, mixed phase, or minimum phase, which has a lower latency so would be better for tracking.
The GUI is clean and crisp, with a main window that allows you to show or hide a range of curves such as Before, After, Target Response, Correction, and Phase. The idea is that you load an instance of the plug-in on your master buss, and mix through it while you’re listening through your headphones, then bypass it when you bounce down. It’s quite fascinating to load up the different curves and compare the responses of different brands and models. The company also offers a list of 24 sets by different makers bundled with the software and a specific calibration file. Sonarworks says these average calibration curves should be accurate to within +/- 3dB, but also offers a service for an additional €99 where you send your headphones off and it does specific measurements for both the left and right channels, which will increase this to +/- 0.9dB.
These digital profile curves, created using a patent-pending acoustic-measurement system called PAPFR (aka Perceived Acoustic Power Frequency Response), can be chosen from a drop-down list and then used with a transparent filter to give you a totally flat frequency response. Sonarworks has measured 32 sets of the most popular studio headphones, including those by AKG, Audio-Technica, Beyerdynamic, KRK, Sennheiser, Shure, Sony and more, plus a recent update adding more exotic cans from Audeze and other manufacturers. Reference 3 is also available in room-calibration flavour, but here we’re going to be looking at the headphone-calibration plug-in, in VST, AU, AAX and RTAS formats. Often even the most expensive sets have bumps and dips at certain frequencies – enter Reference 3 by Sonarworks. There are endless debates on whether mixing using headphones is a viable practice, and one of the main issues is that no set has a completely flat frequency response across the spectrum.
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