Show HN: Cabin Audio – EQ your headphones using your spatial perception of sound
My friend Tyler and I built a website that you can use to make your headphones (or speakers) sound better. It helps you find EQ settings that change the soundstage of your headphones. Soundstage is the space that music appears to fill when you play it through a system. On most headphones, the music sounds like it’s coming from inside your head, which isn’t ideal.

Our website helps you move the music from inside of your head to into the room. This makes instruments sound massive and can dramatically improve clarity, impact, and enjoyment. Don’t try too hard to imagine it - just know that if you can get that effect, it sounds amazing.

Why did we make it?

Tyler produces music as a hobby, and noticed that his headphones kinda sucked, even though they were supposed to be high quality headphones. Music sounded sterile and boring, and it was hard to hear details. To fix this, he bought EQ software. That made his headphones sound 5% better… and 2% worse. Since that didn’t solve his problem, he tried to set the EQ himself. This was infuriatingly difficult, but occasionally he would stumble onto incredible settings. The music became not just fun, but stunning. He noticed new details in old songs. And then he tweaked it a bit more, and by 5am it was gone. But he became obsessed with the idea of setting an EQ based on your own subjective perception.

How does it work?

It plays sounds that have different pitches and left-right positions. On most headphones, you might be able to hear that the sounds are spread out from left to right, but the pitch won’t affect where the sounds are.

This is where EQ comes in. If you adjust the EQ in dramatic ways, you’ll actually hear the sounds move around. This is because our brain uses the frequency balance of sounds to place them in space. Anyways, if you get high pitched sounds to sound like they are coming from higher and low pitched sounds to sound like they are coming from lower, this will also happen in the music.

The results? Instruments become separated from each other and increase in size. In my experience, this is a completely different effect from spatial audio. Spatial audio makes the instruments seem separated, but also washed out and distant. Our method tends to make instruments sound solid and impactful.

You might be asking: how do I know what changes to make? We’re still trying to figure that out. Right now, our answer is guess and check. It can be tricky to find the right changes, although it almost always involves boosting the highs and lows a ridiculous amount.

What do I want?

I want you to try it out! It should only take a few minutes, and maybe you’ll hear details in your favorite songs that you’ve never heard before. To be honest, it also might just sound wonky, but you don’t know until you try. We’re still trying to figure this out ourselves.

Any thoughts or feedback is welcome. Thanks for your time!

Some notes:
- It can be hard to interpret sounds spatially in your headphones. Just try, it is possible!
- Web audio kit is not great when it comes to distortion. Lower the volume slider on the website and jack up your system volume to decrease distortion.
- To listen to music, upload music files to the website. They’re cached in the browser so they’ll remain available after refresh.