New loudspeakers & room digital correction service

[Panomaniac]

I was lucky enough to try the Beta of Thierry's Soundstage Shaper.  I like it.

Headphones are something I use, but don't really like, they seem very artificial to me.  Over the years I've tried every headphone plugin and process I could find, from passive circuits to Dolby, DTS, JRiver, my own DSP experiments, HRTF and anything a Google search would turn up.  None of them lasted long term for me, they always got old and just didn't feel right.

 

Soundstage Shaper is different.  It's subtle, but desirable.  The goal is to place different frequency ranges in the same virtual space, left-center-right.  Headphones can alter that space in surprising ways - more than I expected.  Calibration of the plugin is a two step process and I did not understand the first step on my first try.  Once that was in place, the rest was easy.  I did setups for several different headphones.

 

What does it sound like?  More natural than the normal headphone space.  The sound moves out of the headphones some, but it never gave me that complete "out of the head" virtualization like the Smyth Realizer does.  But the improvement was welcome and certainly resulted in lower listening fatigue and more musical enjoyment.  It simply sounds more natural than headphones straight up, and it leads me to listen longer.  Bottom line, it's the only headphone process or plugin that I've kept using past a week or so.

 

No, I don't know Thierry and have no involvement other than a beta test.   But when an audio plugin works this well for me, I'm not shy about saying so. :)   FWIW - Some of you may know me over at diyaudio.com under the name Pano.  

[Panomaniac]

Hey Bill Brown.  The quest for a natural headphone sound has been long and tiring, sometimes frustrating.

The Soundstage Shaper is odd, at least to me.  It fixes a problem that had never even occurred to me that it existed.  If you run thru the calibration you will hear what I mean - not all frequency bands sound like they are coming from the same direction!  Some of that shift seems to be head/ear dependent, and some of it headphone dependent. The plugin fixes the oddball offset of some frequency ranges.  I find the result just plain easier to listen to.