We live in a portable world. With entire studios in our laptops and backpacks, every room – even the back seat of an Uber – has become a workspace. The main problem point now is monitoring. Headphones provide accurate monitoring on the go, but speakers in a well-tuned room remain the gold standard for music production, mixing, and mastering. While headphones can be highly accurate in the frequency domain, they don’t naturally reproduce the panoramic soundstage that helps our brains perceive width and depth the way speakers do. Sonarworks, the maker of the industry-standard SoundID Reference room and headphone correction software, has released Virtual Monitoring PRO, a way to clone the sound of your room (or any room you like) in your headphones. That’s a bold claim, so I put it to the test in daily use to see how it held up.
Virtual Monitoring PRO combines hardware and software. The hardware comprises binaural measurement microphones paired with a small USB preamp. The software is an extended version of SoundID Reference for Headphones. The system captures the sound of any monitor system in a given room using your personalized HRTF (head-related transfer function). A personalized HRTF means that the emulation models the monitor system and the room exactly as your ears and brain perceive it. Other solutions rely on generic HRTFs and room models; the SoundID system uses your anatomy to capture the sound of the speakers in front of you.
The process begins by sitting at the mix position and inserting the tiny binaural microphone set into your ears. The software guides you through a short calibration routine that measures both the room and your headphones. From this, SoundID creates a plug-in profile that transforms your headphones to emulate the sound of the measured studio monitors. The entire process takes about 5 to 10 minutes, and you can measure and store as many monitor setups as you like.