Introducing OPRA, a powerful new headphone toolkit for Roon and ARC 🎧

[Mike_O_Neill]

Temptation

Ps my shirt but not my body

[Torben_Rick (Torben - A Dane living in Hamburg - Roon Lifer)]

@Jazzfan_NJ

I listened to the Noire X this past weekend at CanJam and damn, are they sweet.

And not difficult to drive I am using my iBasso D16 on low gain

Torben

[BeeKay (Bernd)]

Is it that good as everyone is raving about? Might then need to present my wife a rather well crafted alternative of the truth. Nobody shall get hurt

[Jazzfan_NJ (Listening to JAZZ since 1972!)]

@BeeKay

Is it that good as everyone is raving about?

Yes it is, however there are several other planar magnetic headphones in the $500 to $1000 price range that are also worth checking out. The soon to be released FiiO FT7, which is an open backed planar headphone and should retail for under $1000 is worth waiting for.

[BeeKay (Bernd)]

Thanks, will keep watching for that FiiO. I pulled the trigger on a B-stock DCA AEON2 Noire end of 2022. For sure it needs EQ, but is great for me. Just wondering how much better the X is and how close it gets to an E3 or Stealth. For both I cannot justify the money to be spent. Well, the grass is always greener on the other side.

[Geoff_Coupe]

Talking of planar magnetic headphones… does anyone here have opinions on the Quad ERA/1?

Being a longterm owner of Quad equipment, I’m curious to know if they match up to the rest of the range…

[Jazzfan_NJ (Listening to JAZZ since 1972!)]

@BeeKay

Just wondering how much better the X is and how close it gets to an E3 or Stealth.

Well, the Noire X is pretty darn close to the E3. Like you I also have the AEON2 closed back and would need to make a side by side comparison with the Noire X before buying the Noire X.

[BeeKay (Bernd)]

Thanks a bunch. Very much appreciated!

[papa.jay]

@Geoff_Coupe

does anyone here have opinions on the Quad ERA/1 ?

They are my main headphones and I like them a lot… bought them second hand a few years back… the (fake) leather headband started to dissolve very quickly though… getting replacement seems to be a hassle and is too expensive for my taste… will find some other solution.

[Matthew_Davis]

The way you’re using “tonality” is what I’ve always thought was “timbre.”

[Jazzfan_NJ (Listening to JAZZ since 1972!)]

And what does AI call it?

[SukieInTheGraveyard]

I’ve made an interesting discovery when experimenting with the some settings for Truthear IEMs. Crincale has re-measured a lot of IEMs using his newer Bruel & Kjaer set up. His older measurements used the 711 in-ear. If you look on AutoEq over at GitHub you can see that both versions are listed. OPRA only draws data from the older measurements. I’m wondering why?

[Frank_Kohntopp (Frank Köhntopp)]

Are you going to add settings for the Meze Audio 105 Air?

They should be available:

https://www.reddit.com/r/oratory1990/wiki/index/list_of_presets/

[SukieInTheGraveyard]

It was @brian that initially added the Oratory1990 settings to OPRA. Here is the list of updates that Oratory made on 04.04.2025 which Brian may be able to add to the OPRA database.

[Frank_Kohntopp (Frank Köhntopp)]

It seems there haven’t been updates for a while; the Meze 105 Aer has been out for quite a while.

Oratory1990’s EQ is here, I have added it manually for the time being:

Meze-105-Aer.pdf

[Akerow]

Been playing around HD 8XX profiles, it drops the volume significantly - is that what OPRA is meant to do? All of a sudden my JDSLabs Element (original) no longer has enough juice

Anyway I’ve never EQ’ed my headphones before even though I see it all the time, and especially as something you need to do for the HD 8XX’s… I can’t disagree more, turns it into a basshead headphone.

[SukieInTheGraveyard]

@Akerow

Been playing around HD 8XX profiles, it drops the volume significantly - is that what OPRA is meant to do?

Yes. OPRA includes Headroom Management. This means that the overall volume is reduced so as to avoid digital clipping. See here for more info.

@Akerow

Anyway I’ve never EQ’ed my headphones before even though I see it all the time, and especially as something you need to do for the HD 8XX’s… I can’t disagree more, turns it into a basshead headphone.

The OPRA presets tend to follow the Harman curve. This is a bass heavy preference curve and so probably isn’t suitable for your tastes.

[Calum_Mackay]

When I want to compare an OPRA preset with “the default”, i.e. no adjustment, I create a preset that simply has headroom management of the same value as the OPRA preset.

e.g. the OPRA oratory1990 HD660S preset has (overall) -6.3dB headroom adjustment. So I create a preset with the same headroom management, but nothing else. I can then switch between the OPRA preset, and my headroom preset, with no overall change of volume, allowing an easier comparison of the equalisation effects of the OPRA preset, with “no adjustment”.

For more detail, see my earlier posts:

Introducing OPRA, a powerful new headphone toolkit for Roon and ARC

As some others have noted, the OPRA presets appear to have a headroom adjustment built in, resulting in reduced volume when compared to MUSE disabled, although it’s not shown as “headroom management”. That seems to reflect the overall gain_db value in the OPRA data (not the per-frequency band value), e.g -6.3dB in this example: {“type”:“eq”,“id”:“sennheiser:hd_660_s::autoeq_oratory1990”,“data”:{“author”:“AutoEQ”,“details”:“Measured by oratory1990”,“type”:“parametric_eq”,“parameters”:{“gain_db”…

Introducing OPRA, a powerful new headphone toolkit for Roon and ARC

Yes, seems to be. A quick test… Save the current OPRA preset as a named EQ. Then switch to a null MUSE, i.e. nothing enabled, and load the saved named EQ under Parametric EQ. As you enable and disable PEQ, with this saved EQ, there’s a definite change in volume. edit: oh, and even easier, just load the saved EQ, and click on the RHS “global” volume slider, which shows its default position is -6.3dB (in my case), which is the overall pre-gain for my OPRA preset.