Website to change the soundstage of your headphones/speakers

[JulianMcOmie]

My friend Tyler and I built a website (cabinaudio.com) that you can use to make your headphones (or speakers) sound better. It helps you find EQ settings that change the soundstage of your headphones. Soundstage is the space that music appears to fill when you play it through a system. On most headphones, the music sounds like it’s coming from inside your head, which isn’t ideal.

We thought it would be interesting to share here because it’s such a unique approach to sound. There is so much discussion around what soundstage is, and this seems like a step towards being able to measure and explore it. Super excited to hear what people find with it!

Why did we make it?

Tyler produces music as a hobby, and noticed that his headphones kinda sucked, even though they were supposed to be high quality headphones. Music sounded sterile and boring, and it was hard to hear details. To fix this, he bought EQ software. That made his headphones sound 5% better… and 2% worse. Since that didn’t solve his problem, he tried to set the EQ himself. This was infuriatingly difficult, but occasionally he would stumble onto incredible settings. The music became not just fun, but stunning. He noticed new details in old songs. And then he tweaked it a bit more, and by 5am it was gone. But he became obsessed with the idea of setting an EQ based on your own subjective perception.

How does it work?

It plays sounds that have different pitches and left-right positions. On most headphones, you might be able to hear that the sounds are spread out from left to right, but the pitch won’t affect where the sounds are.

This is where EQ comes in. If you adjust the EQ in dramatic ways, you’ll actually hear the sounds move around. This is because our brain uses the frequency balance of sounds to place them in space. Anyways, if you get high pitched sounds to sound like they are coming from higher and low pitched sounds to sound like they are coming from lower, this will also happen in the music.

The results? Instruments become separated from each other and increase in size. In my experience, this is a completely different effect from spatial audio. Spatial audio makes the instruments seem separated, but also washed out and distant. Our method tends to make instruments sound solid and impactful.

You might be asking: how do I know what changes to make? We’re still trying to figure that out. Right now, our answer is guess and check. It can be tricky to find the right changes, although it almost always involves boosting the highs and lows a ridiculous amount.

What do I want?

I want you to try it out! It should only take a few minutes, and maybe you’ll hear details in your favorite songs that you’ve never heard before. To be honest, it also might just sound wonky, but you don’t know until you try. We’re still trying to figure this out ourselves.

Any thoughts or feedback is welcome. Thanks for your time!


Some notes:
- It can be hard to interpret sounds spatially in your headphones. Just try, it is possible!
- Web audio kit is not great when it comes to distortion. Lower the volume slider on the website and jack up your system volume to decrease distortion.
- To listen to music, upload music files to the website. They’re cached in the browser so they’ll remain available after refresh.

 

[kemmler3D]

This is pretty cool, I only looked at it for a minute, but it seems like it could be an interesting and very handy tool to personalize EQ settings.

A few suggestions right off the bat:

• Allow importing headphone EQ presets - some tools (Soundsource for mac anyway) have a large library of presets (e.g. Oratory1990, crinacle, headphones.com and more) built-in. I think tweaking headphone EQ can work better when you start from an existing corrected profile. A lot of that work has been done already.
  
  
• Crossfeed! I don't know about you but I think crossfeed is one of the most important ways to improve headphone soundstage. Maybe add a toggle for a meyer setting, maybe beyond?
  
  
• Vectorscope? I think showing people an EQ curve and spectrum analyzer with live audio / realtime adjustment is one of the best ways to get familiar with EQ. So, cheers for that alone. It might help people understand soundstage better if there were a vectorscope or other stereo type of visualizer also.

I am sure none of these suggestions are trivial to implement, so don't take these as critiques, so much as endorsements of the concept and what it could grow into!

Welcome to ASR by the way!

 

[JulianMcOmie]

This is pretty cool, I only looked at it for a minute, but it seems like it could be an interesting and very handy tool to personalize EQ settings.

A few suggestions right off the bat:

• Allow importing headphone EQ presets - some tools (Soundsource for mac anyway) have a large library of presets (e.g. Oratory1990, crinacle, headphones.com and more) built-in. I think tweaking headphone EQ can work better when you start from an existing corrected profile. A lot of that work has been done already.
  
  
• Crossfeed! I don't know about you but I think crossfeed is one of the most important ways to improve headphone soundstage. Maybe add a toggle for a meyer setting, maybe beyond?
  
  
• Vectorscope? I think showing people an EQ curve and spectrum analyzer with live audio / realtime adjustment is one of the best ways to get familiar with EQ. So, cheers for that alone. It might help people understand soundstage better if there were a vectorscope or other stereo type of visualizer also.

I am sure none of these suggestions are trivial to implement, so don't take these as critiques, so much as endorsements of the concept and what it could grow into!

Welcome to ASR by the way!

Thanks for checking it out! And thank you for the suggestions, they're super helpful!

Responding to the suggestions:

• This is a good idea! We will definitely consider adding presets.
  
  
• This is also a great idea! Crossfeed is at the top of our list, and we'll focus on it soon.
  
  
• I looked into what a vectorscope is, and it looks really interesting. We're also working on other types of visualizations, and we're pretty excited about them. I totally agree that visualizations are a great way to help people understand audio concepts.

I really appreciate you taking the time to give feedback! Those were great suggestions.