The Principle™

It’s named for the equal-loudness principle: the ear doesn’t hear all frequencies as equally loud at the same level. The Principle doesn’t try to change that for everybody. It just gets your two ears to agree. And it’s personal in the literal sense: same headphones, different engineer, different calibration.

• Calibrate by centering — ten bands of noise from 250 Hz to 12.5 kHz play in both ears at once, and you move each one until it sits dead center in your head. No slider and no numbers on screen, on purpose. About four minutes.
• Boosts only the side that needs it — the weaker ear is brought up to the better one, band by band. Nothing is ever cut.
• Follows the music — an optional quiet run measures the soft parts of a mix too, so quiet passages get their own amounts and loud ones aren’t over-boosted. Near silence it does nothing, so hiss isn’t lifted.
• Fit Check — under a minute: tells you whether your headphones sit the way they did when you calibrated.
• One calibration per name — one for each pair of headphones, and one per person if you share them.
• Can’t end up in your mix — it bypasses itself on offline renders, and a safety limiter catches the extra level from boosts.
• Undo, A/B, and the standard Six Walls toolbar.

Get It! downloads the Six Walls Installer, the easiest way to install The Principle, keep it up to date, and hear about new releases. Prefer to install plugins one at a time? Every platform’s installers and zips are under Individual downloads on the Support page. Full manual on the Support page.