Pentaton 1.6 is out with the best parametric EQ you’ve ever seen
Here at Pentaton we’re big believers of digital purity and go to great lengths to make sure we can listen to our favorite albums in their original, unaltered form. There is no denying however that some listening equipment, especially headphones, can benefit greatly from precisely applied correction filters.
In version 1.6, we’re introducing a realtime parametric equalizer with a spectrum visualizer that reacts to your inputs immediately.
Parametric Equalizer
Equalizers have been used for quite some time now to alter the sound of music. While we at Pentaton are not interested in genre-specific presets or “bass boosters”, we did feel the need to apply minor corrections here and there for our headphones.
Our new, precise parametric equalizer let’s you do exactly that. You can dial in every single filter’s frequency, gain and bandwidth. Doing this on a mobile device can be tricky though, and the few implementations that exists today all suffer from usability issues like obscuring the control points under your finger, not letting you enter values directly, or ONLY letting you enter values directly.
For our equalizer, we decided to implement custom interface controls that allow easy but precise adjustments to all filter parameters using logarithmic scales and haptic feedback. Long-pressing on the current value also allows you to enter a specific number using the keyboard.
Adjustments are applied to the audio graph immediately, even while you’re adjusting a value to help you dial in your filters just right.
Spectrum Visualizer
Visual feedback of your applied settings can help you better understand how the filter is altering the input signal. We’ve built a fast and very powerful spectrum analyzer leveraging SIMD CPU instructions and direct GPU rendering using Metal. No matter the sampling rate or output device latency, the visualizer is always spot on, using only around 1% of your device’s processing power, letting you enjoy your music even longer.
Built-in Headphone Presets
We’ve incorporated the presets distributed through Roon’s OPRA project to Pentaton. These are now just a single tap away for all the supported headphones. The preset database is kept up to date in the background automatically.