Phonopter (beta)

TL;DR: Phonopter is an AU and VST3 plug-in for DAWs (with AAX coming soon-ish) that lets you blind test 2 channels at a time

You can skip straight to the basic description, installation instructions and download links, or user manual

There’s something that probably every single person that has done music production to a minimum level of dedication can relate to:

You spend several minutes surgically EQ’ing a channel, or going back and forth between two threshold values 1.8 dB apart on a compressor, and just as your sense of pride swells at how absolute fire you’re making it sound you realise the effect is bypassed (or you were editing a completely different channel that’s currently muted… to add salt to the wound)

While studying music production and sound engineering at Abbey Road Institute, like many others at the start of their sound engineering path I would often find myself struggling to hear the difference in sound caused by oft lauded effects like the Fairchild 670 or whatever “glue” compressor du jour, or the “sky” band on the Antelope MG4+ (although the latter is probably explained by my age and by stupidly ignoring the need to wear earplugs for concerts and band rehearsals some 20+ years ago)

Truth is, like all other senses, training your hearing is hard. It takes time and practice to be able to discern what a compressor is actually doing (unless you completely smash that waveform into a sausage), or the effect that subtle EQ in the kick-out channel is going to have on the low end of the overall mix, or just how much reverb is too much reverb

But also, and this is the main part that gave me the idea for this plug-in: your ears are VERY suggestible

If you’re old enough you probably remember the mass paranoia around “hidden satanic messages” in popular songs during the end of the 20th century

Back then I didn’t clock that they always told you what the devil-worshipping, drug-binging band of heathens supposedly hid in the reversed playback of their song. I’m sure if they actually made us listen first we would’ve obviously heard nothing but the weird swells of the backwards ringing of lyrics, drums and chords (plus I doubt Mr Mercury would’ve gone through that much trouble to convey his enjoyment an occasional marijuana or two)

The technical term for misheard lyrics is “mondegreen”, and it happens when a listener can’t properly understand the lyrics so their brain just fills in the blanks with the closest familiar words. So when instead you’re told that random noise is actually supposed to say something specific, and it’s close enough, you will actually hear that

By the way, tons of bands have actually added reversed audio in their productions since forever, a.k.a. backmasking. It’s just that the result is a clearly enunciated, intelligible yet often nonsensical recording (“Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont…”) and not a cacophonous jumble that is equally likely to say “here’s to my sweet Satan” as it is “feels like I picked satin”

Anyway, it’s likely that if you believe strongly enough that your settings are bringing out the sounds you’re after then that’s what you’ll hear, regardless of how true it is

Common techniques like constantly bypassing/activating or undoing/redoing only feed the confirmation bias because the same brain that is processing the sounds is the one that’s making your hand click the mouse, and is the one that really wants that low end to sound tight. Besides, if that YouTuber says THIS is the trick that NEVER fails, who are we to argue? Just look at how utterly shocked they all appear in the thumbnails

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the nicest plug-in UI is the main tie-breaker 95% of the time

So the basic idea behind Phonopter is simple: choose two channels to audition and let it randomly decide which one will start playing after disabling the meters. You’ll then be able to switch back and forth, without any visual cues as to which channel is playing (provided you don’t leave the DAW meters visible)

While you do this you can verify that you’re actually hearing what you expect to hear. Once you made up your mind between the two options you can ask Phonopter to reveal which one is playing at that moment

Shout out to my buddy James M for planting the inspiration of what would be the name of this plug-in. When I described it to him he said it sounded like one of those contraptions that optometrists use to switch you back and forth between two corrections and gauge how close to Mr Magoo you are, so I looked it up and found out they’re called “phoropters”. I hope the reason to change the first “r” to an “n” is obvious

If during your test you think Phonopter is broken and it isn’t actually toggling between the sources, no it’s not broken* and it really means you have a great imagination. Congrats!

* well, it’s 99.99% likely it isn’t broken, for now. It is currently a beta version after all

If you’re still with me, 1) thanks, and 2) head on over to the installer download page, or the user manual. If you want to you can subscribe to the beta testing distribution list down below