I wonder if Neumann will ever release a free-to-use version of Neumann Control for Mac/Windows. It’s infuriating that I have to borrow an iPad in order to tweak my EQ.
If they’re not planning on doing so, I wonder how much work it’d take to reverse engineer the communication protocol from the software to the KH750 and reimplement it in order to be able to tweak the EQ from a computer for free. The MA1 app appears to be written in C# and ILSpy can cleanly decompile it... hmm... I’ll start taking a look this week if I have time. From a first glance looks like mDNS is involved for discovery and communications are AES encrypted but I found the key already.
EDIT: did some more digging - haven't tested yet but looks like the mic serial validation routine simply checks to see if the serial starts with a 6 and is ten digits long. The requested "microphone code" actually encodes the calibration; it contains the gain values for a series of preset frequency/Q bell filters. In other words, an individual mic's calibration is not downloaded off a server somewhere. This seems to be overlaid on top of a reference "golden mic" calibration:
View attachment 120230
More details on the microphone code: the first five characters are the encoded gain values for one of the filters each, while the sixth character is a checksum.
If you want to try this software out (with the "golden mic" reference curve and no additional correction) you can use any 10-digit serial starting with 6 and microphone code 777773.
The five filters the gain values apply to, in order, are these:
View attachment 120235
The formula to derive the gain values:
Convert the first to fifth characters individually from hexadecimal to decimal (0-9 stay the same, A=10, B=11, C=12, D=13, E=14, F=15).
Subtract 7 from each result.
For characters one and two: multiply by 0.125.
For character three: multiply by 0.18.
For characters four and five: Multiply by 0.5.
This gives you the gain value for the corresponding filter in the list above.
This info should help anyone that wants to calculate their individual mic's calibration curve - take the golden mic curve and add the five filters encoded in the microphone code to it.
So, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to give the software a shot, but man, what a mistake... sounds much worse than my manual calibration. Basically gave me a much bumpier version of my own calibration. I know that the results with the actual MA1 mic could be different, but my measurement mic is pretty flat under 5 kHz which is where all the corrections are, so I wouldn't expect much of a difference other than a shelf of a dB or two under 200 Hz due to the preset "golden mic" calibration curve. At least it's good to know that my target response is pretty similar, but now I'm going to need to either borrow an iPad or reverse engineer the communication protocol to redo my manual calibration.
View attachment 120269
Ignore comb filtering artifact at 10kHz, this was because both speakers were measured simultaneously and the mic wasn't perfectly centered. I accepted the target curve the software suggested, other than adjusting it >1 kHz so that it would leave the treble untouched. Huge peak at 41 Hz was not addressed, and the crossover/delay settings I chose in my manual calibration filled in the 100-200 Hz dips, while the MA1's did not. On the plus side, knocking off the peak at 1 kHz improved midrange naturalness and clarity.
View attachment 120270
Interestingly, seems like the MA1 software decided to invert the polarity of the subwoofer, since it stays at about 180 degrees phase. This does net less phase rotation, but...
View attachment 120271
The group delay is not any better whatsoever. As can be concluded from this graph and the FR, the bass sounds much sloppier now.
Overall, for someone that doesn't have a good understanding of how to set the delay and generate their own EQ, the software can get you about halfway there in much less time, so I see the appeal. I don't know why, but I was expecting a result better than my manual calibration, which didn't turn out to be the case. It's still much better than how my setup sounds uncorrected though.