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Sonarworks is the word for me today people!
I copped this sweet little program from sister site, Borrowed the Very cheap $60 Mic from the studio and danced around my room for 30 Min like a Manakin on crack.

But the results my friends.. Just wow.
Using this on headphones is on thing, But hearing what this can do with Studio monitors is absolutely astonishing. It's that big of a difference.
My HS5's now sound like the Genelec 1030s at studio..If you are not in a $10k Acoustic Treated room.
GET SONARWORKS

I strongly think it is the most important piece to a home studio next to Monitors.

Anybody else have that jaw drop moment with sonarworks?
Anyone have bad opinions of it?

 

Wonder how much sonarworks could compensate for a poorly treated room?

 

Well I suppose it couldn't hurt it..

My assumption is OP discovered how it made them sound "good" as studio monitors for audio production as opposed to Mcintosh hifi stuff. I'm with you though, I think if anyone doesn't have a proper acoustically treated room they shouldn't even try.

 

I had been using it for quite some time and it's amazing, I bought their mic too and it was night and day. I had a 12 dB peak at 125 Hz and it was destroying the sound of any music I played. Systemwide is good but the DAW integration is a bit lame, I don't like having the vst laying there all the time. If they just could make a little piece of hardware just to set it and forget it ...

 

Might want to check sister site for 4 ... wish granted

 

Had the genelec sam system and atleast i hated that. I think the whole idea is false, you cant fix bad sounding room with just eq if you think about it for a second it makes all the sense. I dont doubt you could make it sound little bit better though

 

it cant do anything for an untreated room. room treatment comes first, then correction.

 

Some important things you can't do with Sonarworks. Those things aren't in the frequency, but in the time domain.
If the room is too small, you must feel the overly sound pressure ('boomy' sound). The reverberation time is very short in small rooms, so reverberation 'melts' with the original sound making it unsharp, in big rooms it is more like an echo. Also it largely depends on the way walls are treated /acoustically damped/. And the the wait-time of delays from L/R F/B U/D walls depend on the way you arrange you gear and on the room geometry itself.

 

I've got a legit version of ARC 2 which makes a big difference, but I wonder if Sonarworks would be a better option?
I assume it needs a specialized mic which I don't have, so probably not an option to do the measurements properly?

 

I was sceptical to ARC2. I am sceptical to Sonarworks. Yes, I have tried them both. But I have already treated my CR and know my speakers inside out. Old dog, yes. So I don't want to mess with it all by adding an EQ on the master.
I'm sure it's great for younger producers who haven't learned their "setup" yet. But it's still a crutch that they have to have enabled for the rest of their...production/mixing/mastering days. (Also, I don't like the 45-ish ms latency that it adds)
That's just my view on it.

 

Phase issues, comb filtering, standing waves, dips and peaks. Good luck. Sonarworks is more of a toy for amateur hobby mixers. Your real option is investigating the problems of your room and addressing them correctly. Headphones can help. Good ones that you know how they translate or simply monitoring on smaller speakers with smaller spl.

 

Just wanted to drop in and say thank you for mentionning this. I ordered the microphone and finished setting it up yesterday.

It sounds SOOO much better/clearer. Everything feels so much more balanced now .
For instance, even just playing the piano, some notes used to sound much louder just beacause of certain resonnant frequencies. Now I can play across the keyboard range and all the keys sound like they are at similar level (which is something I was not used to anymore).

I realize, as many people pointed out, that you can't fix a bad room with just some EQ but for me this is really the best solution:

- I can't use headphones. I had a terrible case of tinnitus which prevented me from sleeping from months and I traced it back to my use of my Sennheiser HD650 headphones. I'm not touching monitoring headphones anymore, it seems my ears don't like them.

- For now, my studio is in the corner of my bedroom (terrible acoustics) until I buy a proper place with a separate room for my music needs. I'm not gonna put acoustic panels in my bedroom in a place I'm renting and not staying long term.

So yeah, for my case, this is perfect. The slight distortions it might introduce are nothing compared to the major improvements I've noticed.

 

You should concider monitoring at lower volumes. Not only does it save your ears but it can be more effective for identifying problems, even when making music that is designed to be played loud.

 

This is an excellent simple tip if you haven't treated your room.
I suppose the Sonarworks concept works fine as long as the mix is never played outside of your studio?

 

Last edited: Jan 16, 2020

The idea is that it pushes the responce closer to flat, so the mix should translate to other systems better. It works, but its one of the last stages in designing a studio.

 

I hate Genelecs

Jokes aside Sonarworks is a great way to make an untreated room sound slightly better, also good for headphone peeps.

 

my laptop speakers resonate badly if my mix sucks ,(secret : i remove some 245 and 540 and 2k narrow q ). i mix on 2 headphones and check mixes in car and laptop speaker. strangely if i only use the laptop speakers the mix turn out to be deadly on big systems. odd i know

 

I have the Sonarworks mic and software. Although it helps in a bad treated room, it is not able to compensate enough to become an excuse not to treat your room. I was in this situation 3-4 months ago when I bought it. Then, I treated my room, as much as I could and the room sounded good itself, but it wasn't as good as I wanted to be. Then I used Sonarworks again. I must say that now I am really happy with my studio sound.
My advice is to treat your room as much as you can, then use a solution like Sonarworks to compensate for the imperfections.