![]() A night and day difference between the perceived soundstage would be underselling the difference I experienced. With the m9XX crossfeed, there was a much more realistic sense of space and soundstage with a good soundstage headphone like the HD800, compared to, say, the SR80e, which even with crossfeed, all the blobs are still in your head. This, to me, drastically reduced listening fatigue, and it also made me care about soundstage in headphones again. You can see it didn't really completely come together, as there was a small gap in perceived soundstage, but it came really close. The blobs were no longer distinctly disconnected. Then came the m9XX and its crossfeed unit. Binaurally recorded music fixed this, but there's so little music I want to listen to recorded binaurally, that it mostly just served as a tease. Like I didn't care if the blobs were in my head or outside, if they were just going to be disconnected blobs of sound anyway. ![]() This is why, for a long time I didn't really care about stoundstage. But it still wasn't really impressive to me, because even if it got outside of my head, it was disconnected an unnatural sounding. Like with a Grado SR series headphone you'd actually see those three blobs inside my head. With the HD800 I at least could experience the "blobs" outside of my head. In the first image, labeled "No Crossfeed" you see the "traditional" headphone soundstage as I experienced it, and this is with a very good soundstage headphone, the HD800. Here is a rough idea of how I experienced soundstage with the HD800 and m9XX: Mid-side allowed me to take that connected, realistic soundstage and then shape it, without disconnecting it. And the soundstage was still a bit more narrow than a speaker setup could ideally produce. CanOpener doesn't get you ALL the way to Speaker soundstage, though, as I experienced it, it was still a bit "wrapped" around your head, as opposed to the mostly flat plane a good speaker setup presents. With speakers the physical placement of the speakers in space allows your brain to turn these blobs into a coherent plane of sound, thus a realistic soundstage. That is, music is mastered with speakers in mind, and thus when you put headphones on, you have three distinct blobs of sound, a central blob, a left blob and a right blob. CanOpener mostly fixed what is, to me, the fundamental problem of headphone soundstage. So, this not only improved the sound I was getting, but also meant I didn't have to worry about limiting my amp/DAC searches to units with crossfeed built in. That was one thing that somewhat annoyed me with built in analog crossfeed, is that it was either on or it was off, there was no tailoring, despite that the crosfeed I'd want for different songs and different headphones and even different DACs and amps could differ. ![]() I was almost immediately blown away with both the quality of the crossfeed (which makes sense because the product is marketed to be used for recording studios) and also the flexibility. However, I saw a few recommendations for CanOpener, and decided to try it out on their free trial. I liked the crossfeed solutions built into the Grace m9XX and the upper tier Chord products. So, I developed a prejudice for only using analog, amp/dac built in solutions. All the other crossfeed DSP programs I had tried were complete crap. Before CanOpener, I only really looked for amps or DACs that had crossfeed built in, as to me, crossfeed is a necessity for long listening sessions. ![]() ![]() To me, CanOpener was a game-changer product. The products I've purchased so far are: CanOpener for mac and iOS and Mid-Side (the full version, although I have used mid-side matrix, which is the free, stripped down version). I mostly mean the desktop plug-ins, but we can also discuss the mobile aps as well. Just thought I'd create a page for the goodhertz line of audio plug in products, especially CanOpener and Mid-Side. ![]()
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