funkmuscle wrote:If you join the Mixbus FB group, you'll see that Tom, the Admin is very old school.. he was a skeptic until her purchased the Ollo stuff. He is blown away by it and as you can hear, a pretty good mix done through headphones. Maybe it's his years of being an engineer so frequencies come naturally but I was impressed with the Play2Me thing.
So maybe join the group and question these seasoned engineers, maybe we're missing something.
Experience of other people is not evidence, especially on psychoacoustics. These sort of things can only be understood by experiment and measurement. Still, I don't doubt that in many situations a device like that is gonna improve mixing results.
For example I can imagine that pillow to be the best way to simulate. in your room, how your mix is gonna sound in a club, as it will make you hear the bass through your body. That's something I can easily think as realistic.
What I think this device will for sure fail to do is giving a neutral sound reproducing system, which is what we are after. It just can't (*). This doesn't mean it is useless. After all, they don't claim the purpose of the thing is to offer neutral sound reproduction, now that I look at it again.
David's method is pretty much just an audiometric test. It is a tweaked version of what your doctor does to check your loudness perception. I think it is the best way to calibrate a headphone (or also speakers) for neutral reproduction.
It depends on what you need. If you need neutrality the pillow cannot help for real (*): the amount of low frequency anybody will perceive will vary because their body and even the chair you sit on will have a role. If you need to simulate how your mix sounds in a club-like environment, where low frequency is so loud to make your body vibrate, then I cannot see any better tool than that pillow. It will do just that, but without blasting low frequency for real in a confined space.
(*) Well, actually nothing forbids to apply David's method to headphones and pillow... this should make possible to calibrate that too... Oh, in that case, if we calibrate a headphone + pillow system with David's method, it would be also neutral... Uhm...