The two Reference plug‑ins offer a little more control over the headphone correction but can’t load room/speaker profiles. Rooms and Guru can load both headphone correction and speaker/room profiles. You can load the correction profile into any of the four plug‑ins: Sienna Reference, Sienna Reference Pro, Sienna Rooms or Sienna Guru. I can understand why: Sienna makes all three headphones I used with it (Audeze LCD‑X, Sennheiser HD650 and Beyerdynamic DT250) better as critical listening tools and arguably reduces the quality gap between them - but it does not make them equal! Getting Started In The Headphone Whisperer, Del Sordo also offers his opinion of various headphones and recommends using Audeze LCD‑X (and planar magnetic models, generally) with Sienna, due to their low distortion and impressive low‑end performance. For example, there are three curves for the Audeze LCD‑X and two for the Sennheiser HD650. The models range from cheap to aspirational, and for some there are multiple profiles Acustica say these account for minor changes in the design or manufacture of specific models, or offer a ‘smoothed’ curve. Sienna now boasts profiles for around 200 different headphone models and Acustica are still adding more. Their head honcho Giancarlo Del Sordo explains, in surprising detail, how they arrived at this approach in The Headphone Whisperer, a free eBook about the development of Sienna ( ). They also limit the maximum gain in different bands, to avoid causing problems, such as increasing distortion in the headphones. Acustica start with technical measurements and a mathematically generated filter to ‘correct’ headphones to their own target curve, but then tweak that filter in light of listening tests. To cut a long story short, there isn’t a universally ‘perfect’ headphone response, due both to the variations in the ear and head size/shape of the wearer and, to some extent, our personal preferences. We’ve discussed the intricacies of headphone design and correction in SOS before so I won’t dwell on them here Sam Inglis’ SOS October 2018 interview of headphone designers and software developers ( ) is a good primer. Download and installation is courtesy of Acustica’s Aquarius app but, curiously, you must find the product listing on the web rather than the desktop version of Aquarius to download the manuals, which I consider essential reading. Called Sienna, this suite of four related plug‑ins (AAX, VST 2 and 3 and AU, Mac OS 10.9 onwards and Windows 64‑bit) and two optional expansion libraries is now available and I’ve been testing it for a few months. I use a lot of Acustica’s ‘dynamic convolution’ plug‑ins, but my interest was piqued when they told me of their plans to launch a filter‑based headphone correction system with dynamic convolution emulations of monitor speakers in real studio control rooms. What can the dynamic convolution experts bring to the world of headphone monitoring? Top screen: Sienna Rooms, with the HOG mains selected.
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