The digital filters of the Weiss Helios
Contents
The Helios offers a wide range of options for applying filters. We pay special attention to these in this review, because we have found that with longer use, it adds a lot of value to apply these filters. The user manual written by Weiss is very useful in this respect. It is a kind of lexicon for audio, complete with charts, explanations of technical terms. Highly recommended, even if you don’t have a Helios!
The available filters are: DeEsser, Vinyl Emulation, EQ, Room EQ, Headphone EQ, Loudness EQ, Dynamics. Some filters are available to headphones or speakers only. Crossfeed Headphones is (of course) meant for headphones and the Crosstalk Cancellation for speakers.
De-esser
The DeEsser filter reduces sharp ‘s’ and ‘t’ sounds in voices, also known as sibilance. There is a choice between a ‘surgical’ and a ‘smooth’ setting. If there are many instruments in addition to the voices, smooth gives the best results. A cappella music and choral works can handle surgical.
The slider can be used to control the degree of surgery, according to taste. The filter works very well, at the cost of a little spaciousness in the soundstage in the highs, but that is a small price to pay for limiting hiss sounds that can be very distracting.
Room correction
We were able to test the room correction of the Weiss Helios at a few places. The extensive documentation on the Weiss website goes a long way to helping us. The nice thing is that Weiss keeps telling us: use your ears! Trust your intuition! With that, using a few simple sliders in the web interface, we manage to get the acoustics of a room with an accumulation of low frequencies and a lot of reflection right. Without measuring microphones and sweeps. As if we were in the control room.
Loudness control and EQ
A slider allows us to control the degree of loudness and dynamics. This is very nice, for instance when we want to play music that should not be too prominent. While writing this review, this allowed us to listen to music without being too distracting. Convenient.