u/baumnn

I have decent studio monitors, but my room talks back. Clap your hands and you hear the reflections hit you a beat later. Those same reflections wreck the low end of everything I play: some bass notes boom, others almost disappear. It took me a while to accept the monitors weren't the problem. The room was.

I figured there would be a Mac app for this. There isn't really. REW is excellent but it's a measurement suite, not a product: set up devices, load a mic calibration file, run sweeps, pick smoothing, generate PEQ filters, export a text file, then find yet another tool to apply it to your system audio. EQ apps exist but they don't tell you what your room is doing in the first place. The polished correction systems are either expensive or tied to hardware.

So I started building Reflect. It's a native menu bar app that does the whole loop:

• measure your room from the app
• see the response as a graph
• generate correction filters
• apply them system-wide
• A/B corrected vs uncorrected with one click

No virtual audio driver, just a light Swift app. It uses the newer macOS audio tap APIs, which is also why it needs macOS 14.2 or later. If you already use REW you can import your own filters instead. The app is fully Apple notarized.

The scope is narrow on purpose: mostly below 200 Hz, where small rooms do the most damage and where correction actually helps. It won't fix bad speaker placement, deep nulls, or an untreated room.

You can try it with the built-in Mac mic to hear the concept and spot obvious low-end problems. For correction you can trust, use a better (measurement) mic.

The screenshots show a measurement from my own room and the app itself

Beta builds are free, each release works for 60 days. After launch it will become a one-time €19.99 licence, no subscription. Beta testers who send feedback get 50% off.

Link: https://reflectformac.com

Before launching after summer, I mainly want to know: is it simple, does it work, do you actually hear a difference?

I am building Reflect, a native macOS room correction app, and I am starting to collect beta testers to test a simple room correction workflow.

The idea is: measure your room, generate EQ filters, and apply correction system-wide to normal Mac audio without buying an expensive correction suite or building a fragile routing chain.

My home office desk is stuck in a corner, which caused two annoying resonances that made music on my studio monitors tiring after a while. I do not have space for proper acoustic treatment, so I started looking for a software fix.

I ended up using Room EQ Wizard. REW itself is great, but it takes some time to learn. It also made clear to me that applying the resulting filters system-wide on Mac was not easy or cheap. On Windows there are solid low-cost EQ options. On macOS I mostly found expensive room correction suites, paid EQ apps, or routing chains that felt too fragile for daily use.

That prompted me to build something myself, and I have been tweaking it for the last few months.

Reflect does two things:

• It imports REW Generic EQ filters and applies them system-wide.
• It measures your room itself and generates EQ filters if you do not want to use REW.

In my own room tests, Reflect’s generated filters landed very close to the filters I got from REW, around 95-98% overlap in the same problem frequencies with similar gain, and Q choices. I am not claiming that will hold for every room or setup. That is one of the main reasons I am opening the beta.

Reflect uses CoreAudio Taps so there is no custom audio driver to install which makes it easy to apply it to all system audio and apps. In my own room, it fixed a nasty 130 Hz boom that made my desktop monitors tiring to listen to. I also added a strength slider, because full correction can sound too processed in some rooms.

Right now I am building the beta waitlist to learn from more real setups. Reflect will be free during beta. v1 will be €9.99 / $9.99 one-time, no subscription.

Request beta access:
https://reflectformac.com

I am especially looking for people using a combination of nearfield speakers or monitors, proper microphones and a room with some nasty frequencies. I am also very curious what people here currently use on macOS for applying system-wide EQ or REW filters.