Well then, I guess my 60-day trial just became a God-only-knows-how-many-days “trial” that will last for a couple years until they come up with some other headphone enhancement software. That’s a sound strategy, if I may say so, to establish early dominance on this yet little-tapped market segment of non-pro, user-friendly DSP correction that can benefit even some high-end models with great potential that have been less than optimally tuned by their manufacturers, the Elear being only one of several that only sounded great on select high-end DAC’s (like the $3k V1 in this particular case). Audeze has its own version of correction software for it’s less-than-perfect models but as as I know no one else use the Sonarworks approach of providing (for download or webcasting) model-specific correction profiles to owners of phones that require correction.
But nothing is perfect in this world. After many hours of careful listening with SoundID I noticed minor glitches such as going offline without the user login off (software logs off Google/email or Facebook on its own, after displaying this info “you are offline” for about 3 seconds) which cause the cessation of monitoring and reverts progressively to the Focal Elear Wired Average profile similar to the profile provided by Ref 4 but more smothered (negative gain becomes definitely noticeable). The only way out of this is to use the GUI to log SoundID off Google and restart it. This may be a Goggle issue though, not necessarily a problem with SoundID itself. Anyway I’m sure it’ll get fixed soon, after all this is almost beta testing we’re doing here and I still haven’t acquired the reflex of turning to the phone app to manipulate SoundID settings. Did some more calibration today and my phones sound a little better even. A little confusing for my 57-year-old novelty-challenging mind but still quite amazing.