What is Sonarworks SoundID?

One of the coolest features of the new CORSAIR HS80 MAX wireless gaming headset is the implementation of Sonarworks SoundID. This is a system that creates your own personal sound profile, which is a huge improvement over merely picking a preset. Let’s take a look at how it works, and why it’s an auditorial game-changer.

When you get your HS80 MAX (or HS65 Surround) and install iCUE, you’ll find an option to set up your own sound profile using Sonarworks. The process is very easy and actually a bit fun, too. It involves taking an audio survey that consists of adjusting sliders to find the bottom lower limits of your hearing, then picking between A and B audio examples.

Your answers to these questions will allow the SoundID program to build a 1:1 tailored audio profile, specifically for you. Additionally, if you, like the much surprised and a bit upset author of this page have “profound hearing loss” in one ear, it’ll take that into account too, apparently.

Audio science is impossibly complex, even from a purely theoretical standpoint. For example, it might be tempting to just google “Best EQ settings”, replicate them in the settings, and get back to gaming.

However, everyone has different hearing ability, it’s not always even between the right and left ears, and people have their own individual preferences when it comes to bass, mids, and highs. This means that that one person’s preferred EQ can sound horrible to someone else’s. All of these issues can be solved via SoundID.

Sonarworks SoundID sorts through these issues with ease. The process alternates between ears, meaning that the sound profile you get at the end will set the volume differently for left and right, resulting in a perfectly even mix. To help take preferences into account, there’s a section at the end that gives you multiple A vs B audio samples, asking you to pick which one you prefer.

Or course, there’s another, perhaps more important reason to use SoundID. A lot of people might not know how to manually adjust EQ settings to their liking, as it is a bit difficult to understand what’s going on. This means that many people might not be getting the best out of their headset, and making your own SoundID profile takes the place of EQ anyway, so you no longer have to worry about it.

At the time of writing, the HS80 MAX and HS65 Surround use Sonarworks SoundID. Simply download iCUE, and you’ll find it in there.