2 days ago
I tried out this audio personalization engine, and now I don't think I can live without it
Everyone's ears are, in some way, completely different. They're differently shaped, their ear canals are deeper or narrower or wider. As a result everyone hears their music differently to one another, and the headphones and earbuds that we use need to be able to make some form of a difference between the different hearing abilities of various users.
I've been lucky enough to have a super interesting demo of an example from Audiodo — and it's very cool indeed. Unfortunately, a lot of the tech involved is currently very much in pre-release phase, so I'm not really allowed to share any screenshots of photos. What I can do, however, is tell you all about my experience. Hopefully, it'll come to more of the best headphones soon.
Interestingly, I've been able to play with Audiodo's personalization before. It's been packed into some of my favorite buds — the Noble FoKus Rex5 and the FoKus Amadeus — and it's been one of my personal favorite audio personalization systems ever since.
It works much the same as many of the other systems that you've seen. Press play, and the system plays a series of beeps and boops into your ears at different frequencies. Press the button when you can no longer hear them, and you're done. It takes about 5-10 minutes, and you need to be in a lovely, quiet space for optimum measurements.
Once you're done, you're given the personalization for you to listen to. In my experience, both with the demo hardware and my Noble buds, the customization made effective adjustments across the frequency range to make sure that I could hear all the parts of my music that I might otherwise have been missing, while bringing down those that might cause problems.
Beyond just making your music sound better, the Audiodo personalizations can also be used in other aspects of your headphones and earbuds. It can be used to make the ANC even better, effectively dealing with the frequencies that you might be more susceptible to.
The biggest is for spatial audio. A personalization that would allow to hear spatial mixes is a very welcome addition to the headphone space in my mind, given that I've often found them to be less than stellar. Perhaps my ears are to blame. To take that out of the equation with a spatial audio personalization that could make these mixes better for my ears would be pretty special.
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I got a small taste of the ANC and spatial audio talents from my demo, but I also can't say too much, given that it might be down to the unreleased earbuds I was sent. But there did seem to be some difference between the ANC and the 3D audio presentation, although how much of this is some kind of sonic placebo remains to be seen.
I'll admit, until I'd tried out Audiodo, I wasn't entirely sure about personalized audio. There's always been a part of me that thinks "It's not how the audio tuners intended the product to sound, so I don't really care." But when my slightly mismatched ears got their drums on the tuning, I was so impressed that my thinking shifted.
Now, I could get a hearing profile that makes sure that I can get the best sound from my earbuds. I hope that it takes off, I really do — especially Audiodo, given how well it worked in my short demo.
