nice test. I can't really talk about pure cross-talk since that never was enough for me. I just mentioned CanOpener since I see it recommended between audio engineers all the time
Once upon a time the audio engineers were actually engineers, and would be able to take out a multimeter and perform tests on consoles, or preamps, etc etc, - who actually understood what was going on in their gear.
There is this lovely recent video (link below) where Amir discusses the highpoints of his presentation to the AES, E in this acronym being Engineering, a body of real audio engineers. One of the conclusions I got from this video, was the positive impact of quantitative scientific evaluation, on the quality of products delivered to consumers (including professional consumers such as audio engineers). But I must add here, on the professional side of things, companies like EchoAudio and Emu, published very detailed specs of their gear, which could be relied on, and have been doing so for many years. I have devices from Echo Audio and Emu, with spec that are still far more than good enough for music production today, unfortunately these businesses either moved on to other things, for whatever reason.
I find a similar major issue with software plugins such as CanOpener, or any other. No one checks using objective tools, how good these tools are. I am not a professional audio engineer(making money from audio engineering is not my regular income steam), yet on at least 5 occasions in the last few years, I have, based on both accidental discovery and deliberate testing, discovered serious bugs in software from companies as major as Waves, which led to their rewriting the published product spec - where they were not willing to make the ideal changes, or to their fixing the bugs.
If today's audio engineers were worth their salt, on receipt of a new plugin or plugin revision I'd expect them to subject the plugin to a barrage of objective tests, to ensure that all the basics are covered. I.e the plugin is doing what it is supposed to do., and also make sure there is nothing unexpected taking place within, however inaudible)
A while back there was an unimplemented oversampling feature, in the included compressor plugin that is provided with the Reaper DAW, and thousands of "Audio Engineers" had been mixing with placebo between their ears - until someone checked ! The unimplemented feature was deleted from the user interface, at the next release, once the cat was out of the bag. I was one of those who had been fooled, cos I trusted the Reaper developers implicitly.
Accidentally, and confirmed via proper tests, I found out that there is a bug in the BS2R plugin, which I've documented here, and sent an email to the developer about this. I only found out cos I use tools regularly to check levels throughout the signal path in the digital domain (i.e the DAW).
I've been using the version of this open source crossfeed tool, provided by Liqube here https://resonic.at/tools/bs2br I discovered, purely by accident, when observing some other plugin behaviour which I won't go into here, that if I have any EQ processing before sending audio to this...
audiosciencereview.com
I am not an audio engineer, i.e a proper audio engineer who studied audio engineering, based on the maths, physics, psychoacoustics, etc @ University, otherwise I might have been able to put together some proper tools to understand what is really going on, in the many options available today, many with unsubstantiated claims.
I am confident, someone will soon be able to provide an objective analysis, that allows us to compare headphone crossfeed and other virtual listening simulation tools. I do have a clue based on some crude testing tools, but not anything that I can unashamedly publish, and ask others to independently verify. Until then we remain in the wild wild west of all kinds of snake oil - Reminds me of the days of Alchemy, where it was all guess work, and spooky ignorance, cos no one really had a clue about chemistry or biology.
Virtual listening on headphones, seems to be at that stage, still in the dark ages, with too many profiting from our ignorance. Have you seen how much Genelec charges for having your HRTF measured? Ridiculous. Even they who should know better, cos they are supposed to be proper engineers, are cashing in, on the abracadabra - the magic arena of binaural listening tools.
Hopefully the kind of work that Amir has done, on measuring other aspects of audio, will be applied by him or others, to headphone listening, so we can choose based on real knowledge, not some waffle by well paid industry endorsers, and their teeming army of placebo induced "audio engineers", who have never used a multimeter in their lives.
