We live in a portable world. With entire studios in our laptops and backpacks, every room – even the back seat of an Uber – has become a workspace. The main problem point now is monitoring. Headphones provide accurate monitoring on the go, but speakers in a well-tuned room remain the gold standard for music production, mixing, and mastering. While headphones can be highly accurate in the frequency domain, they don’t naturally reproduce the panoramic soundstage that helps our brains perceive width and depth the way speakers do. Sonarworks, the maker of the industry-standard SoundID Reference room and headphone correction software, has released Virtual Monitoring PRO, a way to clone the sound of your room (or any room you like) in your headphones. That’s a bold claim, so I put it to the test in daily use to see how it held up.
Virtual Monitoring PRO combines hardware and software. The hardware comprises binaural measurement microphones paired with a small USB preamp. The software is an extended version of SoundID Reference for Headphones. The system captures the sound of any monitor system in a given room using your personalized HRTF (head-related transfer function). A personalized HRTF means that the emulation models the monitor system and the room exactly as your ears and brain perceive it. Other solutions rely on generic HRTFs and room models; the SoundID system uses your anatomy to capture the sound of the speakers in front of you.
The process begins by sitting at the mix position and inserting the tiny binaural microphone set into your ears. The software guides you through a short calibration routine that measures both the room and your headphones. From this, SoundID creates a plug-in profile that transforms your headphones to emulate the sound of the measured studio monitors. The entire process takes about 5 to 10 minutes, and you can measure and store as many monitor setups as you like.
I set up Virtual Monitoring PRO in my personal mix room, capturing my main monitors, as well as in the rooms at Chalice Recording Studio, capturing both the mains and nearfields. I also guided a handful of my studio design students at Musicians Institute to capture the school’s Augspurger mains using their personal headphones. The results were consistent for everyone – the sound and presentation from the headphones became strikingly similar to the monitors. The first moment is genuinely surprising, as every listener instinctively removed their headphones to confirm that the speakers weren’t playing. On headphones, the sound is convincingly in front of you, with natural surrounding room ambience. The system works with any over-ear headphones and standard stereo speaker setups. Unlike some room emulation tools, this does not feel gimmicky. The combination of room capture and a personalized HRTF produces a virtual environment that very accurately reflects the measured space.
The use cases for this tool are many – producing, mixing, or mastering while traveling; referencing studios you enjoy or trust but don’t regularly have access to; sharing the profile of your mix room with clients for standardized remote collaboration; or simply enjoying the experience of speakers in a room while wearing headphones. I even captured my monitors playing in mono so that I could reference, on headphones, the sound of mono playback in a room with natural stereo ambience.
Virtual Monitoring PRO doesn’t replace a well-tuned room, but it meaningfully closes the gap between speakers and headphones. More importantly, decisions made in this environment hold up when brought back to speakers. For mobile workflows, remote collaboration, or even late-night sessions when speakers aren’t an option, this is a genuinely useful solution.