Prior disruptors I’ve talked about here have all been hardware centric.
What I’ve been working on most recently (reinvigorated by this article), as I seek to consolidate/simplify my headphone rig, is a combination of software and process-derived data, and right now it is looking to be much more impactful than any of the hardware-driven disruptions I’ve talked about to date.
I’ll summarize what I’m doing as “automated, goal-seeking, convolution filter and DSP generation”.
The end result is necessarily both chain and instance specific. Unit-to-unit variation is one factor here, but not the only one. There are ways around this, with their own complications and limitations, and are something I’m building into my tooling/code.
When that’s done, I’ll likely share a couple of the filters/DSPs for one or two models of high-end headphones (though you’ll need some specific software/know-how to take advantage of them at this stage).
I don’t want to say too much more at the moment, at least until I have some specific paperwork filed. But I will say that the results I am getting so far are impressive. And more dramatically so than I would have imagined.
If things stay on their current track I can see my headphone collection being reduced to just the SR1a, SR-009S, Vérité LTD and Focal Utopia (and probably the Vérité Closed LTD, since mine is so pretty and I can’t buy another one … even if I don’t need closed-back cans anymore).