Targets and preferences
This page is the practical follow-up to Why targets exist. Now that you know what a target represents, here's how to pick one, adjust it, and read the preference bound.
Picking a target
The Target selector at the top of the Graph panel lists every target the site's operator has included. The exact list varies per deployment — two different squig.link sites won't necessarily ship the same targets, because each one can curate the list for its own rig and philosophy.
- Click a target to load it onto the graph. It appears as a dotted line with its own row in the selection list.
- Click another target to load that too — targets aren't mutually exclusive. You can overlay two or three and compare.
- Click a loaded target in the selector again to remove it.
Targets always sort to the top of the selection list, so they're easy to find amongst your loaded devices.
Customizing a target
Some sites let you nudge a target toward your own taste without editing files. Targets that support this show a small sliders icon in their row in the selection list. Click it and a popover opens with a handful of filters and presets.
The exact filters depend on site config, but a typical lineup is:
| Filter | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tilt | Overall warm/bright tilt across the whole spectrum |
| Bass | Low-shelf boost or cut for the sub-bass and bass regions |
| Treble | High-shelf boost or cut for the upper presence and air |
| Ear | Peaking filter around the ear-gain region (~2–3 kHz) |
Drag a slider and the target curve reshapes immediately. The changes are on top of the original target — they don't replace it. If you turn baseline on with "without adjustment" vs "with adjustment" modes (see Working with curves), you can see the effect of the adjustments in isolation.
Presets
Most deployments ship with one-click presets — typically Harman 2013, 2015, and 2018 — that apply a combination of the sliders for you. They're useful starting points:
- Click a preset to load its slider values.
- Tweak further from there if you want.
- Click another preset to overwrite, or reset to zero to start fresh.
Your customization is stored in the browser session and encoded into the share URL. The site's original target files on disk are never modified. Reload the page (without a share URL) and you're back to the stock target.
Which targets can I customize?
Only targets the site operator has marked as customizable. This is a config choice, not a user choice — operators can lock down certain reference targets so they always appear unmodified. If a target's row doesn't show the sliders icon, it isn't customizable on this deployment.
The full feature doc with all the config options is at Target Customizer.
Preference Bound
In addition to a single target line, research says there's usually a range of tunings most listeners find acceptable — not one exact curve. modernGraphTool can draw that range as a shaded region on top of the graph, called the preference bound.
Toggle the preference bound from the graph toolbar. When it's on:
- A shaded area appears, representing the upper and lower limits of the acceptable region.
- The area is anchored to a configured base target — usually a diffuse-field target — so the bound moves sensibly as you change the target selection.
- Curves that stay inside the shaded area are in the research-backed preference range; curves that poke outside it are either brighter or darker than most listeners prefer.
This isn't a pass/fail test. A headphone that ducks outside the bound in one region might still be enjoyable — it just means it's an opinionated tuning rather than a safely neutral one. Treat the bound as "how far from the middle of the road" rather than "right or wrong".
The preference bound needs data files the operator has to ship, so on sites that haven't configured it the toggle button doesn't appear. See Preference Bound for the full feature doc.
Recommended workflow
A typical "try a new headphone" session looks like this:
- Load the headphone from the Device panel.
- Pick a target you like as your reference (Harman IE, a reviewer curve, whatever).
- Normalize at Avg (the default) so the two are aligned across the midrange.
- Optionally turn on the preference bound to see whether the headphone's overall sound is within the acceptable range.
- Baseline the target if you want to see the headphone's differences directly as a line around zero.
From there you can decide whether the differences are changes you'd welcome or changes you'd want to EQ away.
Next: Equalizing audio.