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I never said it didn't sound like headphones. I said it sounded bad. Especially cymbals.
I use jriver which has clipping protection for starters. I don't turn it on because the peak level with the plugin on never approaches 100.
I have just went through the steps you mentioned with Miles Davis and some Aaron Copland and I can still hear, quite obviously, tinny compressed cymbals with stepped decay when compared to having the plugin off. The speaker level setting ended up at about 9 o clock and the peak level never went past 50%.
The size of your head and ears will have nothing to do with the frequency sounding off, and the processing artifacts that are audible. You are arguing a point as if I don't believe that it works to put the sound in front of you. Which what I am saying is that regardless of how the plugin affects the sound stage, the sound quality is noticeably worse.
For what it's worth I am using TB_Isone v2.5.0 Demo with JRiver media center 17.0.147.
For those of you who are having problems with Isone, why don't you guys just contact Jeroen like I have suggested several times in this thread? He's incredibly open-minded and friendly, very receptive to criticism and suggestions, and when I gave him my feedback on how to improve Isone in the past, he was always very gracious and appreciative. He knows Isone better than anyone, and he'll be able to tell you whether something is wrong if you're hearing things that he did not intend Isone to do to your signal chain.
Seriously, have you guys thought about the possibility that maybe you're not hearing what Jeroen intended Isone to sound like? Maybe there is a glitch somewhere in your signal chain that may or may not be caused by Isone? Talk to Jeroen and he'll help you figure it out. The guy knows more about audio and DSP than any member at head-fi, bar none, and if you guys are passionate about audio, he just might be the most knowledgeable/experienced/authoritative person you'll ever talk to about audio, so why not take this chance and talk to him?
Why are there such extremes opinions on this thread? It's either "haters gonna hate" or this plug in "distorts and compresses." C'mon.
The plug in is good, and it works as advertised, and whether you like what it does or not is a different matter. I feel like that line has been posted a hundred times in this thread. When I had some clipping issues, I simply adjusted the level knob to fix it.
Did I notice a loss in certain low level detail w/ Isone? Yes. But that's only because that's how speakers would sound sitting in a room 2 meters from you! The goal of the plug in is to create a more natural presentation, which it does pretty well for something that costs so little--increasing detail retrieval is not it's goal.
To do that, get better headphones with a faster diaphragm! Then make sure your chain is up the task. And you know what, maybe that's what accounts for the discrepancy in opinions here--from what I see Luna owns O2s. Stax are hyper detailed. I've found the most success using Isone with DBA-02/B2 IEMs, also known for being hyper detailed. The recording/mastering was also a variable.
The truth about Isone, as it so often does, lies somewhere in the middle I think. Isone's not so good as to replace actual speakers, or maybe it's not even as good as the Realizer (gasp).
Some may not like it enough to concede that it sounds as good as their speakers. I can understand that. Their opinions aren't invalid, and I certainly don't presume that all these people simply need to learn to appreciate it better as a "real life audio professional" might. We all have a wealth of experience with our ears, and we have all certainly heard enough speakers and headphones to know the difference between the two. Hopefully we'll have more tempered posts here, and hopefully refrain from hyperbole.
I no longer have the Stax rig--I sold it. I prefer my LCD-2 (using my custom EQ curve).
And you're so right about how Isone is meant to be used. Its job is NOT to increase detail retrieval--it's actually in many ways, to decrease it.
Isone was created for audio professionals to test out their mixes in virtual environments and different emulations of speaker cabinets, so they can make sure their mixes sound good in all kinds of different environments and on all kinds of different speaker systems--from tinny laptop speakers, flat screen TV speakers, all the way to high-end speakers, as well as anywhere from standing in the hallway with the door closed, in tiny square rooms, to large living rooms. So many of these combinations will alter the audio dramatically, and not in a good way--that's all intentional. But it is also capable of creating the illusion of a very pleasant virtual environment using emulation of a totally neutral/flat virtual speakers.
It may not be hyper-detailed compared to typical headphone listening where the drivers are right next to your eardrums, but it should approximate how speakers should sound when placed a couple of meters away from your ears in front of you, and by pushing the sound away from you by a couple of meters and having the sound intermingle with the virtual room's acoustics, of course it's going to decrease that hyper-detailed sound into a smoother, more natural sound. Some people who mistakenly want Isone to retain the same hyper-detail as having the drivers right next to their eardrums simply have incorrect expectations of Isone--they simply do not understand the purpose of Isone and why someone would want to use it.
As for those who simply think it sounds bad--I really don't know what to think of that. I have no idea if they're using the plugin incorrectly, or have software/driver/hardware conflicts causing distortion/artifacts. I have no way of knowing whether what they are hearing is identical to what I'm hearing on my end. And because the way they describe the sound they are hearing is so different from what I'm hearing, I can only assume they aren't hearing what I'm hearing--including the fact that we are physiologically different from one another (which explains why different people would listen to the exact same rig but have drastically different opinions of it--they don't have the same ears/brain/conditioning from experience, so they in fact, don't hear/perceive that rig in the same way).
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I was talking about the software side. Sorry I wasn't clear. Something along the lines of that particular version of Isone not getting along with the exact version of the VST host you're using if one of them has a bug. If you're running other DSPs besides Isone they could be interacting like that as well.
Honestly it doesn't seem very likely but if you're actually hearing some sort of gross distortion then something has to be wrong somewhere. I've never heard those kind of artifacts from it when it wasn't clipping.
It could be anything that's causing problems in the signal chain. It could be the sound card/audio interface's driver (for example, I've had a lot of problems with Creative's drivers in the past, causing all kinds of odd glitches), or any kind of weird bug from any number of software that is being run in that computer, or a faulty installation of a software, or bad interaction between software/plugins, or something in the hardware chain, or just someone's physiology being very unique.
