Isone Pro - the best thing you could ever get for your headphones on your computer - Page 42

You can eliminate the echo by fixing the room size, I guess. I haven't tried your settings yet.
 

I'll preface this by saying that my experience is with Isone Pro not the newer version. I have read many comments here from people who found this plugin to get bad results and that prompted me to chime in. I first tried this and was ready to just throw it out. I heard many of the complaints I have read in this thread. It sounded unnatural, compressed and tonally unconvincing. I just put it aside and came back to it in a few days and decided to very slowly go through the adjustments to give it a fair chance. This was not fun. It took many hours. At the end I was rewarded with everything the program promised. I was using my T1's and the sound stage almost exactly replicated the sound of two high quality speakers in my listening room. This was no small revelation. It no longer sounded as though I was wearing headphones. I tried this with a wide variety of music and found the results to be very consistent. The tonal balance did change from the sound of my headphones without Isone, but it changed in a very natural and pleasing way. I did a/b many times and found the Isone results to be different in exactly the ways the designer promised. I like what it does and when I use it I get the feeling that I am listening to a couple of very high quality monitor speakers instead of the uber-real headphone sound I have become accustom to. The T1's throw a very convincing out of head sound stage without any help from Isone but it is nothing like listening to speakers in a room. Isone does that for me in a very convincing way.

I also own a pair of HE500 and for the life of me I was unable to get the same results with the Hifiman. After carefully going through all the setup procedure again I had to conclude that my HE500 just could not be made to work with Isone (at least not nearly to the extents that it does with the T1's). Maybe this program just matches well with my head and my ears and your results will vary, but for me this is a keeper.

Hi, 

Since you have had success with it, would you mind posting your settings. Of course it will be different for every person and their system, but I'm curious to see one that's worked out. Perhaps we can use it as reference point or baseline for our own adjustments. Thanks.

Quote:

Originally Posted by edwardsean 

Hi, 

 

Since you have had success with it, would you mind posting your settings. Of course it will be different for every person and their system, but I'm curious to see one that's worked out. Perhaps we can use it as reference point or baseline for our own adjustments. Thanks.

I doubt that my setting will help. What I discovered in this process is that the setup is very much a personal process. The program tunes the setting to your specific ears and headphones. I seriously doubt that my exact settings will work for anyone else. I also found the settings to be very critical and a small change could ruin the whole thing. I started with the room setting turned off and never turned them on until I felt I had the HRTF adjustment correct. That took hours and testing with many different tracks to confirm. If you leave the room setting on it just confuses things and makes too  many variables. I listened first for speaker position as though there were real speakers in the room. I used two chairs in position as speakers to do that I could see my reference points (I think your brain needs the cue). Once I had the location dialed in I concentrated on the tonal character. My objective was to get it so that there was little or no difference between on and bypass. That probably took longer than all the rest of the setup combined. I knew once I introduced the room setting that tonal character would change some but I had to get it close to my original headphone sound first. The controls are really sensitive. A small change can really ruin everything and it is not as easy as I would like it to have been. A lot of a/b testing. When I finally turned on the "room" I used modest settings to see how it changed things and decided on what I thought was a natural sound with very little compromise (almost no lose in detail). You can use this without ever turning on the room setting and get very good results. I eventually decided to go with the room setting because the final product sounded very much like speakers I had listened to for years. A coincidence perhaps, but it was a sound I was very comfortable with. I will caution that my experience with my HE500's suggest that this may not work for all headphones. Or maybe I didn't try hard enough with them since this is such a long process and I had already done it all for my T1's. 

How do these work?

I extracted the archive and placed the whole thing into the plugins folder for winamp (and VLC) and it doesn't show up in either.

What exactly are you meant to do with them?

The most natural and neutral crossfeed to my ears so far (tried Redline, head-fit, Jriver's native crosfeed plugin, sheppi, Isone Pro, ...):

If you want to push the sound a bit in front of you (but don't wanna colour it too much), I would advise to set Distance around 0.30 m (all other parameters stays the same as they are prepared for manipulation with the Distance knob)... That's the best you can get without influencing source quality too much IMHO.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MHOE 

The most natural and neutral crossfeed to my ears so far (tried Redline, head-fit, Jriver's native crosfeed plugin, sheppi, Isone Pro, ...):

 

 

 

If you want to push the sound a bit in front of you (but don't wanna colour it too much), I would advise to set Distance around 0.30 m (all other parameters stays the same as they are prepared for manipulation with the Distance knob)... That's the best you can get without influencing source quality too much IMHO.

 

 

This was good sounding settings. It moves the sound in front of you without messing with the tonality too much especially with 0.30 distance.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sweden 

 

This was good sounding settings. It moves the sound in front of you without messing with the tonality too much especially with 0.30 distance.

This is the best that I was able to achieve with TB Isone (and any other plugin trying to let headphones sound more natural)... When setting the distance to zero, I can hardly spot any negative degradation of the sound (but this is intended for crossfeed only!). When setting it to 0.30 m, it's somehow the best compromise between quality and spatial effect (you can try to move it somewhere up to 0.50 m that should be "ok" as well). But someone can have different opinion, that's absolutely normal and correct I would say!

Quote:

Originally Posted by MHOE 

 

This is the best that I was able to achieve with TB Isone (and any other plugin trying to let headphones sound more natural)... When setting the distance to zero, I can hardly spot any negative degradation of the sound (but this is intended for crossfeed only!). When setting it to 0.30 m, it's somehow the best compromise between quality and spatial effect (you can try to move it somewhere up to 0.50 m that should be "ok" as well). But someone can have different opinion, that's absolutely normal and correct I would say!

I'm liking the settings more and more. The J River crossfeed sound very natural as well, but it doesn't move the image in front of you like this settings does.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sweden 

 

I'm liking the settings more and more. The J River crossfeed sound very natural as well, but it doesn't move the image in front of you like this settings does.

Glad you like it, really! 0.30 m came up from intensive testing -> everything sounds just "right" or "in place" in comparison with lower values AND it doesn't colour the sound too much as higher values does. You can always try to experiment with 0.25 - 0.35 and come up with the best value for distance out of them for you (we are talking about very subtle changes of course). 

In case you are curious -> Jriver's crossfeed ("headphones" plugin) set at "subtle" is also really good but it sounds a little bit "flat" or "sterile" to my ears and with some specific songs it doesn't work as good as it should. Higher settings are not as good as subtle is. It is all because Jriver offers a pure crossfeed only. TB Isone is quite more progressive as it delivers a VERY natural crossfeed with a little spatial effect (subjectively) even when set to work as crossfeed only (0.00 m distance).

You can still try to use Jriver's together with some other plugin for more spatial feeling (sheppi, ...). BUT it cannot beat TB Isone with my settings IMHO if you want natural but still neutral sound! However, I am still open to testing new things and as soon as something EVEN better appears I am ready to try it :-)

I must be lucky and have an average sized head/ears but the default settings work really really well for me :) I only tweaked the distance a little and set the frequency preset to "flat".

Quote:

Originally Posted by kalston 

I must be lucky and have an average sized head/ears but the default settings work really really well for me :) I only tweaked the distance a little and set the frequency preset to "flat".

If you look at my setting, it IS almost "default" :-)

Quote:

Originally Posted by MHOE 

 

Glad you like it, really! 0.30 m came up from intensive testing -> everything sounds just "right" or "in place" in comparison with lower values AND it doesn't colour the sound too much as higher values does. You can always try to experiment with 0.25 - 0.35 and come up with the best value for distance out of them for you (we are talking about very subtle changes of course). 

 

 

In case you are curious -> Jriver's crossfeed ("headphones" plugin) set at "subtle" is also really good but it sounds a little bit "flat" or "sterile" to my ears and with some specific songs it doesn't work as good as it should. Higher settings are not as good as subtle is. It is all because Jriver offers a pure crossfeed only. TB Isone is quite more progressive as it delivers a VERY natural crossfeed with a little spatial effect (subjectively) even when set to work as crossfeed only (0.00 m distance).

 

You can still try to use Jriver's together with some other plugin for more spatial feeling (sheppi, ...). BUT it cannot beat TB Isone with my settings IMHO if you want natural but still neutral sound! However, I am still open to testing new things and as soon as something EVEN better appears I am ready to try it :-)

The level of crossfeed in J River depends on the headphones and even more the music.

Listening to older music like The Turtles - Happy Together the sound is noticable better with normal crossfeed rather than subtle at least with some headphones.

Guys, you must calibrate the HRTF settings or else to be downright honest, you aren't getting 'natural' imaging at all.

Isone is designed to emulate nearfield speakers at 30 degrees, not really as a pure crossfeed.

Also to calibrate it, you really need a good test track with deep soundstage and instrument separation e.g.

My settings and why it makes sense (click image to enlarge):

Quote:

Originally Posted by chinesekiwi 

Guys, you must calibrate the HRTF settings or else to be downright honest, you aren't getting 'natural' imaging at all.

Isone is designed to emulate nearfield speakers at 30 degrees, not really as a pure crossfeed.

 

Who said we all want "you-say-natural lossy speakers sound"? I want "to-my-ears-pseudonaturally-sounding hyperdetailed experience" with my headphones and that's perfectly what TB Isone offers when using my crossfeed settings (together with Eq neutralisation created for my headphones). ,-)

I've compared almost any crossfeed plugin and none of them can beat TB Isone's versatily and pure stereo sound quality which is very significant with particular songs (or particular sequences of particular songs) that require "a special care" to not hurt my ears very much...

Maybe when gaming or watching movies, TB Isone can do a great job when using all its features... But for music, pure and versatile crossfeed is what I want in order to keep the required level of detail and still perceive it naturally without any unwanted artifacts.

I have been tweaking with both Isone Pro and TB Isone for months and all I can say is that I didn't spend a huge load of money on Denon AH-D7000, Objective2 with ODAC and other things related to software side of the thing to ***** up all the effort by coloring and degrading the sound using TB Isone in an inappropriate way IMHO. I want to hear the music, not the plugin. The official manual is helpful to achieve something that can sound balanced, a bit spatial, pushed and straighten in front of me... But there ALWAYS are artifacts, unwanted deformation of the source (e.g. emphasised recording and mastering defects ...), coloring and dramatic loss of detail if you use HRTF together with EAR SIZE (HEAD SIZE is as well that case)!

Just saying - Foobar's SQ sucks, man... You should get something better like Jriver or ulilith, both supporting VST plugins. And get a better equalizer (if you use TB Isone for that alone) as well...