is there free portable software to test a sound card & tune it.

I

IAmForum

Weaksauce
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Looking for a way to make sure my sound card and headphones are flat, so I can have the same sound the gaming developer intended.

Is there testing software that can facilitate this process ?
Is there tuning software that can make the needed adjustments to get the sound as flat (non boosted) as possible ?

tHX
 
You are currently listening to it as they intended, a sound that would sound good on a very broad spectrum of devices and setups. If you wanted to hear it as they did, you would need their equipment

Maybe talk a little about your setup as well. Every set of headphones has a different tone to them. And even human ears are not flat response.

As far as analyzing your sound output you would need a decibel meter to pic up the sound from your headphones to analyze it to the source wave. Then use an equalizer to boost/lower the high and low spots it detects. You'll need a tone generator which should be easy to find a program to do that. For equalizer, your soundcard software may have one.
 
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Lookup tutorials on using REW (Room Equalization Wizard).

Output from your soundcard should be flat to begin with as long as you have all software EQ, Dolby/etc disabled at the OS and driver level.
 
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Your soundcard is flat, that is just a non-issue these days. DACs are flat, even cheap ones are linear to way beyond human perceptibility. You can have other problems with cheap DACs like analog stages that produce too much noise, or not enough current to drive bassy phones properly, but linearity is not an issue.

Your headphones are not flat, but you don't want them to be. Turns out flat headphones sound like crap, they don't sound the same way flat speakers (which sound good) do. Has to do with the way sound interacts with our ears. We don't have a 100% "correct" answer as to what curve they should have, different people have different preferences, but the closest thing we have is the Harman Curve, which is based on actual scientific research on listener preferences.

So you can EQ your headphones to match that more closely, if you like. Your earbuds, I don't think I can help you with as those are not common so I don't know that anyone has tested them. Your over the ear phones are popular, so there are measurements and corrections for them. A guy who goes by the handle Oratory on Reddit measures phones and produces correction curves targeting the Harman Curve. For yours it looks like it would be this one. Doesn't look like it'll make a lot of difference as they track the Harman Curve decently, and they don't respond to EQ that well so it doesn't change things a lot.

You then need a way to apply that equalization to what you are listening to. Some media players can do EQ, you can also do a system wide EQ with something like Equalizer APO.

Now as for actually testing your specific equipment and tuning it to your specific phones, no you can't really do that. Not that it is impossible, it is just too expensive. You need a headphone measurement rig. The cheapest I'm aware of is from miniDSP for about $300. Not sure how good a job it does. An actual reference headphone measurement rig from someone like Gras is like $10,000.
 
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IAmForum said:
Looking for a way to make sure my sound card and headphones are flat, so I can have the same sound the gaming developer intended.

Is there testing software that can facilitate this process ?
Is there tuning software that can make the needed adjustments to get the sound as flat (non boosted) as possible ?

tHX
Click to expand...
SoundBlaster Audigy RX has bit-perfect mode. their may be other cards with that but that's what i use.

RX is a good card tho, it's same chipset as old Audigy 4 Pro which was marketed to people for recording and audio production. (i use to have one of those too but they don't make PCI slots on motherboards anymore) studio grade dac/adc's

edit: and don't let anybody tell you that "motherboard audio is just as good" because it's not. doesn't even come close.
 
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I KNOW that onboard sound sucks compare to my
blasterx g5
play! 3
play! 4

I even bought a motherboard with an integrated sound card that was supposed to be "premium sound"----it was OK at best
 
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