The Experts team wondered what we thought people would want to find behind the windows of a dream studio advent calendar. Some of the things we own, some we wish we did. Owned or not, we think any of the things we name in the next 14 days would be a gift to a professional studio owner. Today Luke Goddard talks about Sonarworks’ speaker monitoring correction software SoundID Reference.
Day 11 Sonarworks SoundID Reference
The advancement and democratisation of audio technology can be a double-edged sword. The operation of advanced tools by non-engineers can have its pitfalls, but with clever engineering from manufacturers and developers, simplicity and learnability can be improved upon. Unfortunately, one thing that does not change for anyone is the physics of how loudspeakers behave in a given room, and up until fairly recently, no amount of fancy monitoring alone could influence that.
Up until around eighteen months ago, I was one of those working in a room with far from ideal acoustics who had their workarounds. The first, was knowing the problem frequencies of the room in the low end (that being most of them!) and mixing with those in mind. This involved cross-checks on known headphones, moving around the room to listen, and listening on other systems. Fairly effective but far from ideal. I had been sceptical of what EQ-ing monitor speakers could achieve until I started using Sonarworks SoundID Reference.
On setup, the system measures the response of the room at multiple points by triangulating the position of the mic with impulses played through the monitors. Sine sweeps played through the monitors provide data for each point, and SoundID Reference creates an inverse response for them that aims to iron out anomalies at the listening position.
This software has certainly made my mixing life much, much easier, and being able to better trust my monitoring has made me realise how happy I am with my existing setup. SoundID Reference lets the user set up profiles for multiple sets of speakers and headphones, through a choice of interfaces. I have settled on using it standalone for system-wide correction which avoids bouncing anything with correction across the DAW outputs by mistake. As I’ve found, there is nothing like the reassurance that things sound right to help me forget to bypass it for the bounce…