Topic: Denon Audio - A Fruity Player/EQ App

[Sidhe Priest]

Denon Audio

- that's a little app for IOS devices which does two absolutely necessary things: bypass the built-in psychoacoustics and provide a multiband equaliser. It is free, Denon released it as an ad for their own headphones (there's a little catalogue of headphones built-in), and as a complement for their own headphones (the "sports" version even has GPS and step counter/jog meeting functions).

Apple players have a heavy psychoacoustics processor which is by default on. It does a lot of loudness compensation and it acts as a spatialiser. The psychoacoustic EQ loudness compensation is there to extend battery life, the spatialiser is probably meant to compensate for lowly earbuds' lack of definition.

This deforms space presentation and can murky things up. Suffice to say that played through the Denon player app with a flat EQ, KMFDM's "Amnesia" finally had Lucia's voice sounding sweet and defined (previously it could be hard to make the lyrics out).

Denon's fellows might've finally gotten sick of Apple players messing music up, so they devised their own player. Fixing Apple software player's shortcomings.

The equaliser is quite detailed, there's even a 1/3 octave option. It's a multiband equaliser with an optional fire vis overlaying the frequency plot of the music piece in playback. The player itself is a variation on Apple's own music player interface.

There are a few quirks and downsides, as usual. One is that Denon's EQ processor eats up more CPU cycles, and so the Denon Audio player chews battery up quicker than Apple's, especially as (downside No. 2) since the default volume is fairly low with Apple's psychoacoustics off, a boost in the equaliser is needed to make the thing as loud as Apple's stock music player. It also likes to squash/stretch non-square artwork (the app simply doesn't implement correct aspect ratio scaling). It could also have a "shuffle all" feature, which funnily enough is absent. But there is a playback queue, and an option to save the playback queue as a playlist, something Apple's default player lacks.

The big benefit of a true equaliser (as opposed to Apple's fixed presets) is that headphone frequency response can be compensated for. Now, this might come as a shock to some, but I've got four pairs of Denon headphones: AH-D1000, AH-D210, AH-D310, AH-P372. Each one has its own frequency response, and while the first three are fairly straight, AH-P372 aren't. All of the headphones were modded. Wolf on Air, by the way, owns a set of AH-D310 I've modded for him, here's a photo:

Long story short, this app is what fruity players have been always missing. True fidelity playback and a working equaliser.

[TechPro]

Awesome!  Many thanks on finding (and telling about) this!

Downloaded, tried it, loving it!   And I'm not even using Denon headphones.