New Music Gear Monday: beyerdynamic Headphone LAB Plugin

If you’ve ever tried to mix in a bedroom, a hotel room, or any space that isn’t acoustically treated, you know the challenge. Studio monitors are only as good as the room they’re in, and building a properly treated space costs serious money. That’s exactly the problem beyerdynamic set out to solve with the new Headphone LAB plugin, a free DAW insert that’s designed to turn its DT series headphones into a legitimate mixing reference.

Your Studio in Your Headphones

The idea behind Headphone LAB is straightforward. Standard headphone listening delivers an isolated signal to each ear, which creates that unnatural “in-your-head” stereo image that makes critical mix decisions difficult.

Headphone LAB addresses this with a sophisticated crossfeed model that accounts for frequency-dependent time and level differences, essentially simulating how sound from studio monitors actually reaches your ears in a real room.

Beyond the crossfeed, the plugin calibrates your specific DT headphones to a studio sound profile developed through years of beyerdynamic research and collaboration with professional studios.

There are two calibration options available. Standard Calibration is based on a “Golden Sample” reference unit defined by beyerdynamic’s acoustics team, aligning each headphone to its studio sound profile.

Factory Calibration goes a step further, pulling the original production measurement data from your specific pair using its serial number to compensate for even the finest manufacturing and material variations. Factory Calibration is currently available for the DT 700 PRO X, DT 900 PRO X, DT 1770 PRO MKII, and DT 1990 PRO MKII.

Dialing In Your Space

Headphone LAB also includes a handful of useful customization tools.

You can manually enter your ear spacing and head circumference to fine-tune time-of-arrival differences, adjust the virtual speaker angle to 40, 60, or 80 degrees, and dial in an optional room simulation to create a consistent reference environment.

That last feature is particularly handy for producers who move between locations and need a stable sonic baseline to work from.

The Practical Case

If you already have a great-sounding room and a pair of trusted nearfield monitors, Headphone LAB can serve mainly as a secondary reference.

That said, if you’re mixing in an untreated space, working late nights at low volumes, or producing on the road, this plugin might be just the thing to elevate your mixes to studio level.

Headphone LAB is a free download for Mac and PC and supports VST3, AU, and AAX formats, making it compatible with virtually any DAW you’re running. It requires no subscription, no license key, and no upfront cost, the barrier to entry is about as low as it gets.

Standard Calibration works with all current DT series studio headphones and DT series in-ear monitors, but note that it works only if you’re using these beyerdynamic headphones.

You can find out more here, or watch the video below.