dSONIQ releases Realphones 1.8 | Headphone mixing plugin | Updated sound and new rooms
by dSONIQ   5th July 2022

Excellent! Thanks for the free upgrade, excited to try this!
Reduced latency sounds promising.

That's great!

I always turn the limiter off to save CPU but have to attenuate the level, which makes it a bit less comfortable A/Bing with bypass.

SUPER happy with the club check addition Car too, and there's a lot of stuff & improvements besides that..

I once read somewhere about the Club etc additions and that the update(s) might come with a price tag, so thank you very much for this one!!

Just updated. Really good. My favorite headphone mix tool. Funny thing is that they control room sounds extremely like my own professional built control room. Almost to a scary degree lol. So this translates epic for me.

Regarding a paid upgrade they did send a mail conserning a future V 2.0 that won’t be a free upgrade

Thanks for a free update, just played around with new emulations, they sound really good! Room and speaker emulations also sounds great, seems like there is an improvement too. Haven't touched Realphones for a while, but I think I'll give it a try once again.


By the way, there's a visual issue, that's been around for a quite some time. In Easy mode the images of speakers are constantly updated, with different pictures, corresponding to a selected emulation. There are cubes, HS models, far field subwoofers etc.

But in expert mode they're updated in some really weird way. Like, there's an image of NS-10s when Speaker Response is set to Room Speakers and Room Emulation is set to Studio (any Set).

But if Room Emulation is on Set A and I select Japanese 7" Classic (which, I asume, are actual NS-10) - the image changes to some other black speakers. And selecting other emulation on Set A does the same. Changing emulation on Sets B and C just changes corresponding speaker image to a golden, brighter image version.

Of course, it doesn't affect sound, but it is hella confusing from a UI/UX perspective. Especially considering that easy mode has all the speaker images, and changes them succesfully, so image resources are there.

Is it by design, or can we hope for a fix?

New room emulations - “Car”. Great, but what does that mean "Clean, Normal, Dirty. I did not know that in the car you can hear music better when it is washed or dirty.

like this.

This will be rearranged in Realphones 2.0. The Expert mode will be the extension of Easy mode so it will be no visual confusion.

Going to download and install soon. Thanks for the free upgrade!

Great update, thanks.

Do we have to "refresh" our profiles? I just installed 1.8 and authorized it.

If you have just installed and authorized Realphones, then you already have updated correction profiles.

Those who have upgraded to 1.8 from previous versions can click "Refresh" in the License menu to update profiles.

Excellent, that's what I did. Thanks!

This could've been a 2.0 easily. The definition, depth, low end representation, how transients now sounds more clear than before which was already good are definitely a HUGE improvement. The difference is unbelievable. Thanks for improving this great software.

Super cool and generous. The nearly 60% reduction in latency is very welcome. Sounds great so far - looking forward to doing some mixes.

Installation was a breeze but, if I may suggest, maybe you can give the installer a version name. I like to keep the current and previous installers and sometimes software doesn't want you to rename anything.

Cheers.

Thank you for the suggestion!

Legacy installers with versions in file names are available here now: https://www.dsoniq.com/download/release-notes

So If I buy the current version now will V2 be free? or is V2 way of yet?

The Realphones 2.0 update will be free of charge for anyone who purchases version 1.8 and those who purchased 1.7 less than 12 months before the release of 2.0. We hope to release 2.0 in the December of 2022 but this can change.

I’ve tried every headphone mixing solution I’ve been able to get my hands on and Realphones has been the clear winner.

Looking forward to updating to 1.8

Can you explain why it is the winner? Did you compare to Sienna?

Nice, I think I'm hearing an improvement in the HRTF model. It used to give the highs a bit of a filtered/processed quality (which is what is going on I suppose) for me, but I'm not getting that now on first listen.

Sharing my favorite somewhat conservative HD 600 settings.

Just updated. If I had more free time these days, I'd have tried to set up Realphones 1.7 and 1.8 on separate machines to compare the difference, but I can't see myself doing that in the foreseeable future.

@ dSONIQ , I'd love to hear more about the upgrades to the core sound, especially the improvements to the room emulation and psychoacoustic target curves. What changed for you as the designers, and what changes should we look out for as users?

I have sienna. While I like how it sounds, it has very high latency and they haven't added the ER2SE like I asked whereas Realphones did it pretty much immediately. Also, dSoniq has added car and club and for Sienna, that's a separate add on. Further, Realphones has handy monitoring features like a low pass filter, mono and sides. As a result, I just use Realphones more; even if 1.7 didn't sound as good it was more practical. With 1.8, I might not need to switch back.

In the summer of 2021, we switched to an advanced headphone measurement technology that took into account more factors than before. We have moved to the new studio and built the new reference speaker system. We have also set up our auditory verification protocols very carefully, which allowed us to build a target curve we had never been more confident about.

In addition, we were able to conduct additional psychoacoustic research with this new speaker system, which allowed us to improve our HRTF curves. During this time, we have carried out a large number of measurements of headphones and received a lot of new statistical data. More accurate measurements allowed us to work out the core of the sound.

As for the room IRs, with the new data, we recalculated the rooms from our raw microphone records anew. These IRs have passed through new target curves and new verified procedures, now they fully comply with the measurement standards that we have developed over the past year. Also all headphone curves added and updated from the summer of 2021 match our new standards.

So from designers' point of view we got much less errors in our curves and IR's. From the user's point of view with Realphones 1.8 you get more realistic less colored sound image and more detail across the whole spectrum

All this has become possible thanks to the interest of our users. We want to thank everyone who purchased our product! We will continue our work on improvement of Realphones.

Club mode awesome for checking low end on electronic music love it thanks for update

Does this mean some of the original headphone curves do not? How can we know if we have old curves that do not match the new measurement standards? Do you intend to update all your headphone curves to your new standards?
Thanks.

Brilliant update - this software has changed my life! I also love the club mode for checking low end - it’s HUUuuuggge!!
Great stuff.

I'll be honest; I wasn't expecting a lot from the club setting, but it's really convincing!

I already use Slate VSX and SIENNA but I gotta say, this is very, very good. Great detail/separation, nice and punchy and the extended bass models sound great for checking low end. Going to use it in some beta sessions and see how well it translates but so far I like this, a lot. Strictly speaking I don't need it but...

If I have the output lowered by -8dBs and switch to different configurations inside "Mix" and "Mix Check" those -8dBs are kept which is great for comparison purposes but that's not the case with the configurations in "Mix Check 2". It resets to zero which is obviously not ideal.

Snapshots save output levels, I’m pretty sure. Right click in left-side toolbar, Take Snapshot then right-click again to rename or delete. Not sure if you can rearrange the snapshots by dragging but, if not, I think that’d be a good feature.