Finding Your Best HRTF Profile

HRTF is personal — the same measured profile that puts crisp, obvious front/back separation on one person's ears can sound flat or confusing on someone else's, because it depends on the exact shape of your head, shoulders and outer ears. Find my best profile is a short guided listening test that figures out which of the bundled Immersive profiles works best for your ears, instead of you guessing your way through the Profile dropdown by hand.

Opening the test

Two ways in:

• On a channel's SPATIAL tab, with Model HRTF set to Immersive, click Find my best profile right under the Profile dropdown.
• From anywhere in the app: the Help ▾ menu in the top menu bar → Find my best profile. This way doesn't need a channel open at all — the result is a fact about your ears, not any one channel, so you can run it before you've even set one up.

Before you start

A few short setup screens run once at the beginning:

1. Headphones check — this test only works on headphones, not speakers, since it depends on each ear hearing a genuinely separate signal. A test sound plays and you say which side you heard it on, to confirm your setup before the real test starts.
2. Volume calibration — set a comfortable level with the test's own slider. This is independent of your channel and bus faders.
3. A short practice round (3 sounds, not scored) — gets you used to clicking on the polar plot before anything counts.
4. Choose a length — Quick (~4 minutes) or Thorough (~7 minutes, more listening per profile for a steadier result).

If you've run the test before, this first screen also shows your last result (which profile, how certain you were, and when) so you can see it at a glance without starting a new run.

Taking the test

Nothing plays automatically — press Space (or click the on-screen button) whenever you're ready for the next sound, so your own pace and any mouse-click noise never land on top of it.

Each sound asks one of two kinds of question, mixed together:

• Point at where you heard it, then rate your certainty. Click on the polar plot — or press a number key as a clock position (12 = front, 3 = right, 6 = back, 9 = left) — then rate 1–5 how certain you were. Being unsure is a genuinely useful answer here: a lucky guess doesn't help a profile's score the way a confident, correct answer does, so there's no benefit to claiming more certainty than you actually felt.
• Hear it, then judge a claimed direction. The sound plays, and only afterward does an arrow appear showing a direction. Rate 1–5 how well it matched what you heard. Some of those arrows are deliberately wrong — the test is checking whether you can tell true from false, not how generously you rate them.

If a couple of profiles come out close after the main round, a short bonus round gives just those extra listening time, rather than the test guessing between two similar-looking numbers.

A few things help if you need them mid-test:

• Replay — repeat the current sound, up to 3 times per question.
• Back one — undo your single most recent answer if you realize you misclicked or misjudged your rating. It only ever undoes the one most recent answer, not a full history.

The result

The test gives one of three honest outcomes — it never forces a pick it can't back up:

• A clear winner.
• A genuine tie between two profiles that scored equally well for you. Both are shown, and you can apply either one directly — the test won't force a coin-flip pick between profiles it can't actually tell apart for your ears.
• No recommendation, if nothing scored well enough. Your existing profile setting is left untouched.

Not fully confident in a result? Run it again & combine on the results screen reruns the test and pools every sound from both attempts into one steadier answer — worth trying anytime you're unsure, not only when two profiles tied.

A handful of hidden check questions run throughout the test to catch a distracted session — if too many come back inconsistent, the result is flagged as a rough hint rather than a confident answer, and it's worth re-running somewhere quieter.

Applying a result:

• Apply [Profile] — sets it on the channel you opened the test from.
• Apply to all Immersive channels — sets it on every channel currently using the Immersive model.

(Opened from the Help ▾ menu rather than a specific channel, only Apply to all Immersive channels is offered — there's no single channel to apply to in that case.)

The winning profile is remembered afterward: it shows a ★ next to its name in the Profile dropdown, with a short "recommended for you" note underneath and its own one-click Apply to all.

What it actually tests

The test doesn't listen through all 20 bundled profiles — that would take far too long to sit through. It draws from 6 candidates picked ahead of time to represent a broad spread across all the measured profiles, on the reasoning that testing 6 properly beats testing 20 poorly in the time you're willing to spend on it.