Digital Music Reviews

Spend some time shopping for headphones, and you’ll quickly grow tired of devices claiming to present music “as the artist intended,” despite sporting vastly different sound. But what if your favorite cans actually could sound like the recording studio where your favorite music was mixed? Enter SonarWorks, a company I’m guessing you’re not familiar with, as it’s best known in audio engineering circles for tuning professional studio speakers. Now SonarWorks is turning its attention to something more mainstream by calibrating headphones to sound like those same studios. The concept is simple. First you tell SonarWorks’ software, called True-Fi, which headphones you’re using; 138 models are supported, at the time of writing. It then modifies your PC’s audio output in order to “flatten” the frequency response into something very close to the neutral sound of a professional mixing studio. And I do mean very close.

The electric guitar pickup has been wound since 1934. 80 years later, we’ve unwound it. Original and totally re-imagined, Fishman Fluence pickups are free from the hum, noise and frustrating inductance issues that plague even the most coveted wire-wound pickups—revealing pure, uncorrupted and musical tone. With a couple of notable exceptions, new electric-guitar pickup technology tends to not fare well in the marketplace. Sometimes it’s because the new designs seem more for engineering’s sake than sound’s. But most often it’s because guitarists are addicted to classic tones achieved using World War II-era technology. “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it,” is our basic MO. Heck, even many radical experimentalists prefer vintage pickups as starting points for their aural anarchy. So why did revered acoustic pickup and amplification guru Larry Fishman venture into this world filled with, as he put it last year, “too much voodoo”? In a nutshell, because he felt the technology behind ...