How to get a big soundstage in any can - no modding.

[Lunatique]

I have never had any lag from Isone Pro, and I have used it with J River Media Center 14, Latest Winamp, in Cakewalk Sonar 8.5 Producer Edition, Xulop Chainer, and on a 7-year old computer running XP that's very slow by today's standards. I have tried it on a 1 yr-old Sony VAIO laptop running Vista, and it runs just fine too on in all those apps I mentioned.
 
If you are having problems, then you need to adjust your audio buffer and other relevant settings. Most of you are probably not used to having to adjust these things since you aren't composing/sequencing music on your computers or using it to do pro audio work. But there are tweaks you can make to get your computer to respond much more quickly for audio, and the driver settings is the first place to start. You can also set your computer to allocate processor resources towards background services in the computer's advanced system settings.
 
In regards to what Isone actually is for, I posted the following in the Isone Pro thread, and I'll repost it here:
 
It seems some of you don't really understand what Isone Pro is designed for.
 
It's purpose is to make your headphones sound like you are listening to speakers in a room, with the sound coming from the same position as speakers would in real life--in front of you on either side. The parameters in Isone Pro allow you to specify the distance of the listening position to the speakers, how wide apart the speakers are (this feature is coming), the size of the room, and also head/ear parameters to match your uniquely sized head and ears and how they affect what you hear in real life.
 
It's a tool for professional audio people who sometimes need to work on headphones, but have been wary of it due to the drastic stereo separation of headphones (no natural crossfeed like with speakers). Isone Pro takes it a few steps further beyond simple crossfeed and allow you to simulate specific listening environtments and speaker cabinets so you can check how your mix will sound on difference types of speakers, including common consumer ones like flat screen TV speakers, small multimedia speakers, car stereos, or even how your mix sounds when someone is standing outside the room. These are incredibly useful tools to the audio professional, because now they don't have to burn a mix every time and then go around to different parts of the house and to their car to check their mix in different environments and on different devices. All of these features are complete overkill and unnecessary for non-audio professionals or musicians, but typical music lovers and audiophiles can still benefit greatly from those features that are relevant to them--mainly the simulation of listening to speakers in front of you in a room of your choosing.
 
Some of you probably didn't read the manual either, thus not understanding how Isone Pro operates. In the manual, it's greatly stressed that the user match Isone Pro's parameters to the reference monitor speakers they use for audio work, so that when they put on headphones, it will sound as much like those speakers as possible in terms of cabinet positioning and room acoustics. That right away tells you what Isone Pro was designed for. If you don't even have reference monitor speakers in your setup, then you won't even understand that aspect of this plugin. But even then, you can still create an ideal listening environment via Isone Pro so that you can have the perfect virtual listening room every time you put on your headphones. It's not just a crossfeed plugin--it is a virtual listening environment simulator meant to sound very real.

 

[stang]

I refuse to read the manual. I tried Isone Pro and it is working fine, I am just not very fond of it. I dislike the sound tbh. I have my monitors if I want a speaker-like sound.

 

[Br777]

HOLY MOLY..  i remember seeing one of lunatique's threads months ago hyping isone pro.. i remember downloading the demo and trying it with my denon d2000 and very quickly dismissing it as blah...
 
well now I own the Mighty Thunderpants.. a Extremely substantial upgrade from the d2000... and these cans already trounce.. well.. everything i have ever heard.. so i thought i would give this isone pro demo another go...
 
in all fairness i have played with it for all of about 10 seconds, but DAMN!  i see some real potential here.. I am definately going to spend some serious time with this plug in.. ITS AMAZING!
 
THANKS!!!!!

 

[Lunatique]

Quote:

I refuse to read the manual. I tried Isone Pro and it is working fine, I am just not very fond of it. I dislike the sound tbh. I have my monitors if I want a speaker-like sound.

Yeah, but is your room acoustically fully treated? How does it fare if you were to scrutinize its accuracy and neutrality and behavior of room modes by professional standards? This is the beauty of Isone Pro--if you have a set of respectable headphones that are known for being accurate, neutral, and full-ranged sounding, then Isone Pro will put it in a virtual listening space that is ideal, without typical room modes and bad choices of listening position and speaker position that most people suffer from in real life.
 
And Isone Pro is a professional audio plugin. It has very specific parameters that needs to be carefully tweaked to match your head/ear and also your listening environment (assuming your listening environment is one of professional audio quality). By willfully refusing to read the manual for a professional product, you are being unfair in your comments. It's like buying a professional DSLR with advanced controls and then say that it sucks because you don't know how to use it and the photos you took look like crappy point&shoot photos taken by a drunken uncle.

 

[Ypoknons]

I'm not surprised. If SVS and Beyer have sophisticated headphone DSP then no reason why the Pro's can't. It seems to do the same job too. 

 

[Ruffle]

Quote:

I refuse to read the manual. I tried Isone Pro and it is working fine, I am just not very fond of it. I dislike the sound tbh. I have my monitors if I want a speaker-like sound.

Funniest post I've read on Head-Fi this week.  I refuse to learn, I will adamantly remain ignorant and refuse to learn to use it.  I do not like it, I will dismiss it even though I haven't a clue!
 
Awesome post.

 

[stang]

Quote:

Funniest post I've read on Head-Fi this week.  I refuse to learn, I will adamantly remain ignorant and refuse to learn to use it.  I do not like it, I will dismiss it even though I haven't a clue!
 
Awesome post.

Cheers 

 
I do not care if I remain ignorant on this topic. I tried it and disliked it with DT880 and HF-2. Now to try on Denon D5000.
 
I do not have the time or patience at the moment to fiddle around with it. I am sure it would most likely sound amazing when some tweaking, but as of now, I clearly do not like the effects. 
 
And no, my room is not acoustically treated. I barely even use my monitors, because I have others in the house that I am sure they wouldn't want to be disrupted with loud music playing all the time. 
 
Maybe I am just too used to the sound of stereo headphones and haven't given Isone Pro a chance to win me over. I dislike reading manuals anyway, as most do. 
 
I have never heard a professional system, and doubt I ever will. Maybe this is why I dislike this. I am used to crappy sound and when really good sound comes along I have no idea if it is worse or better. I will admit it sounds a lot different. Getting used to is something I am unsure I should do. When it comes to using a CD player or vinyl setup, I may hate how it sounds. From there, I will regret trying Isone Pro. BTW that "I refuse to read a manual" was partially a joke. It is the attitude I put toward things like computers, TVs etc. I figure out how to use them/build them very easily without any help. Audio is obviously very different. I have many years ahead of me, so why jump into all this at once. 
 
I am not saying this Isone Pro is bad. Not at all. Just that I don't feel like fully trying it out right now. Don't have too much time on me. Working, holiday assignment, trying to get my hours up as a Learner driver (gotta drive for 120 hours over a 2 year period). I take those more seriously than this hobby. 
 
Ok, listening to the Isone Pro, I am liking it more now. Treble seems to be tamed, mids are laid back more (bad), soundstage wider and there is more bass. I guess it is like comparing Grado HF-2 to Beyerdynamic DT880 600ohm. Although I generally prefer DT880 to HF-2, so maybe all this needs is some getting used to...

 

[Mochan]

Are you using the Paid version or the Demo version?
 
Quote:

I have never had any lag from Isone Pro, and I have used it with J River Media Center 14, Latest Winamp, in Cakewalk Sonar 8.5 Producer Edition, Xulop Chainer, and on a 7-year old computer running XP that's very slow by today's standards. I have tried it on a 1 yr-old Sony VAIO laptop running Vista, and it runs just fine too on in all those apps I mentioned.
 

 

[stang]

Me? Well I may as well answer for myself anyway. ASIO is what caused Winamp to lag. All is fine with foobar2000 and Winamp. I am only using Isone Pro Demo. I don't know yet if buying the full version is worth it. Need to do some more testing when I get the opportunity. 

 

[Lunatique]

 
Quote:

Are you using the Paid version or the Demo version?
 

Mine is paid for. I bought it as soon as I tried the demo and fell in love with it.
 
Quote:

 
I am not saying this Isone Pro is bad. Not at all. Just that I don't feel like fully trying it out right now. Don't have too much time on me. Working, holiday assignment, trying to get my hours up as a Learner driver (gotta drive for 120 hours over a 2 year period). I take those more seriously than this hobby. 
 
Ok, listening to the Isone Pro, I am liking it more now. Treble seems to be tamed, mids are laid back more (bad), soundstage wider and there is more bass. I guess it is like comparing Grado HF-2 to Beyerdynamic DT880 600ohm. Although I generally prefer DT880 to HF-2, so maybe all this needs is some getting used to...

That's understandable. Not everyone at head-fi is a passionate music lover who lives and dies by that passion. Music for is how my soul keeps alive, so it means something very different to me.
 
Isone Pro really shouldn't be changing the frequency response much--any changes you do hear should be the result of the room simulation, as any room will automatically do that to the sound, unless it's an anechoic chamber. You turn off the room simulation or the head/ear simulation completely and just keep the crossfeed. You'd know that if you read the manual. Also, the manual explains how to get the best sound from the plugin, but if you just don't care enough about any of this, you wouldn't want to follow the procedure explained in the manual anyway as it'll take some time to tweak.
 
But for future references, if you really don't care enough about something and aren't willing to give it a fair chance by using a product properly as designed and intended, then it's really unfair to be making negative remarks about it. These products are the blood, sweat, and tears of the programmers/DSP designers who conceived them and spent precious time developing them, researching them, testing them, upgrading them, maintaining them...etc. We should respect their hard work and be fair about our comments, especially that they sometimes barely sell enough to stay alive. This is especially true of small indie developers who are not big corporations (Jeroen is just one guy, BTW).

 

[Azathoth]

Thanks for this tip, something to keep in mind just in case I run into midrange-shy cans in the future.

 

[SP Wild]

Isone Pro X-feed with D7000 is incredible.
 
I have three x feed implementations to compare with D7000 (I only believe in X feed for closed cans).  The foobar one shrinks soundstage and rolls off treble, ie it's absolutely useless. 
 
The JR one is more "transparent"  because the crossfeed is similar to the tonal soundstaging of the K701 (ie more emphasis in mid to upper mid staging creating an expansive stage) - with this X feed the D7000 effectively becomes my successor to the K701s - detail retrieval is incredible.  Instrument separation and "air" is its forte. 
 
Isone pro meanwhile, firstly - all the pressable buttons need to be pressed off to bypass everything that is speaker related.  With the buttons on, I felt transients took a hit and the top-end frequency energy hardened up.  I played with the two big knobs, but eventually found the default setting to be perfect.  This x-feed (must disable speaker and head options) is tonally unaltered.  The soundstage is as wide as the JR - due to the staging tone is centered at the lower mids, hence subjectively is not as expansive, but the result that the natural warmth of the D7000 is retained whilst instruments are finally separated with the increased soundstage.  This  X feed effectively enables my D7000 to exhibit all the attributes that I love about the HD650.  Intimacy and imaging is this xfeeds forte.
 
Personally, my ears had a little orgasm when I finally dialled in isone pro to the D7000s - longer term use will dictate whether the HD650 (my fave can) will be missed or not.  I also wonder if the Isone and D7000 combo will allow me to synergise this can with my valve amps - which never matched well in the past.  I hope so.
 
So this is it for me.  My personal tonal preferences dictate that the D7000 + Isone Pro combo is the best audio quality I have had the pleasure of owning.  Without the benefits of X feed my favorite combo has always been the tubed HD650.
 
Its unfortunate that the most popular X feed is the useless Foobar one - it shrinks the sounstage of closed cans even further and lessens overall transparency.  The JR and Isone algorithms not only expands the soundstage of closed cans to match and even exceed open cans, but they also significantly improve detailing and transparency.  I urge all closed can users to try these two algorithms.  I hope members will eventually realise that the Foobar algorithms is not a true indicator of the experience that x feed can bring to the table.

 

[Mochan]

Had the opposite experience... Isone Pro Crossfeed did not give me intimacy, quite the opposite it let me feel that the music was far and away around me, which I loved.  This is the quality of the K701 that I loved the most... and Isone let me have this with my other cans like the HD650 which is normally very intimate.
 
I agree with you though, Foobar's XFeed is useless. I honestly don't hear any difference in sound with it no matter what settings I use.

 

[SP Wild]

I'm in no way disagreeing with you.  The soundstage enhancement is very real.  What I should have said that it was able to preserve some of the "initimacy" or warm tones of the D7000 - wherea the JR did take a bit of it away and made the D7000 more "neutral" wheras I prefer "natural".

 
BTW - I love how you made a customised Grado - perhaps one day you can hone your natural curiosities into a nice income supplement.

 

[stang]

I never said that Isone Pro was bad...I just said that currently I dislike it and I do not have the time nor patience to weak it. Will probably read the manual when I have time. I hope it isn't one of those manuals that takes a decade to read. That's what puts me off reading manuals in the first place...
 
It is good to hear music means so much to you. I am different. I live for the gear, not the music. If anyone is going to make any negative remarks towards that, don't even bother.