What is this tool?
modernGraphTool is a web page for looking at how headphones sound — not with your ears, but with a graph.
When someone measures a headphone, they play a signal through it that contains every audible pitch, from the deepest bass rumble to the highest shimmer.
A microphone on a fake ear at the other end records how loud the headphone plays each of those pitches. That recording, drawn as a line on a graph, is a frequency response curve. This tool is for loading those curves, putting them on top of each other, and comparing them.
The curve you see is typically raw — it's literally what the measurement rig's microphone heard. It isn't "the headphone alone", because the rig has its own acoustic quirks baked into every recording.
To make sense of the shape, most sites let you overlay a target: a reference curve designed for that specific rig that represents some chosen definition of "good sound" — sometimes neutrality, sometimes a research-backed preference like Harman, sometimes a reviewer's personal taste.
A headphone whose raw curve sits close to a target matches whatever that target represents; anywhere they differ is where the headphone departs from it. Pages 03 and 04 explain this properly — for now, just know that what's drawn is raw, and a target is how you turn it into a judgment against a chosen reference.
What you can do here
- Compare headphones. Load two or three and see where they differ. A bass-heavy headphone will sit higher on the left side of the graph than a bass-light one.
- Overlay a target. A target is a reference line that represents somebody's chosen definition of how a headphone should measure on this rig — neutrality for one target, research-derived preference for another, a reviewer's taste for a third. Compare a headphone against a target to see how close it gets to that definition.
- Try on an EQ. If a headphone has a peak that sounds harsh, you can draw a virtual dip at that frequency and listen to an audio sample through the correction, right in the browser.
- Share the result. Every change to the graph can be encoded into a link that someone else can paste into their browser to see the exact same view.
Do I need to be an audio engineer?
No. This tool is used by reviewers and researchers, but it's also used by people who just want to pick their next pair of headphones and want to know what the marketing copy isn't telling them. Nothing on this page assumes you've studied acoustics.
If you've never seen a graph like this before, the next three pages are a short primer. They explain what you're looking at, why the curves wiggle the way they do, and why "neutral" is harder to define than it sounds. After that, the rest of the guide is a reference for each control you'll actually see on screen.
If you're curious about why modernGraphTool exists and how it differs from the older CrinGraph, see Why modernGraphTool?. That page is about the project. This guide is about using it.
Next up: Reading the graph.