PHON Studio monitor controller for macOS

Not for the controller functions. PHON handles volume, source selection, speaker and headphone switching, mono and side checks, dim and mute, calibration and protection, in the digital domain before your converter. A hardware unit sits after the converter and, unless it is purely passive, adds a conversion or an analogue gain stage to the path. What hardware still gives you is a physical knob and a built-in headphone amplifier. For the knob, any MIDI controller maps to PHON in seconds. For the headphones, your audio interface already has an output. The full comparison is in our software versus hardware guide.

PHON runs at your interface's buffer size and shows the current sample rate and latency at the bottom of the window. It is a monitoring path, not a plugin in your session, so it adds nothing to your DAW's recording or playback latency. Per-application capture uses macOS Core Audio taps, which add a small buffer of their own on the captured source.

Both sources have to sit at the same loudness or the louder one always sounds better. MATCH measures the two for three seconds, to ITU-R BS.1770, and moves the input trim of the source you are not listening to, so what you are hearing never jumps and the two are already aligned when you switch. Both sources need to be playing; if the other one is silent the button says so and nothing changes. A double-click on the input trim undoes it.

Set source A to your DAW and source B to the application playing the reference: Spotify, Apple Music, a browser, a video player, another DAW. PHON captures that application directly on macOS 14.2 and later. Press MATCH: PHON measures both for three seconds and trims the one you are not listening to, so the two sit at the same loudness. Then switch with a click, a key or a MIDI button. Nothing is imported, nothing is added to your session, and your master bus is untouched. The full method, and how the reference tools compare, is in our guide to level-matched A/B.

No. That button applies one fixed shelf regardless of level. PHON computes the correction from two numbers it actually knows: your calibrated reference SPL and the current fader position. At the reference it applies nothing; below it, the difference between the ISO 226 contours for that drop. Above the reference it stays out of the way by default, and you can ask it to compensate there too if you want. The why and the numbers are in our loudness compensation guide.

No. At 0 dB, your calibrated reference, PHON applies no correction at all: no EQ, no processing, exactly the sound you are used to. The compensation only comes in when you turn the volume down, and it disappears as soon as you come back up. You can leave it on permanently and forget it. An amount control in percent lets you scale it, separately for your mix and for the reference source.

Yes. PHON drives up to three stereo outputs, each on any device and channel pair, so you can put your mains on the interface, an alternate pair on another device and headphones on the built-in output. Each output keeps its own input trims, pan, loudness compensation amounts, low cut and limiter, and switching is a click-free crossfade.

Open Settings › Calibration and choose a reference: ITU-R BS.1116-3, SMPTE RP 200, K-20, K-14 or your own values. PHON plays pink noise at the reference level through one loudspeaker at a time, with the fader held at 0 dB; set your monitors or your interface’s output until an SPL meter at the listening position reads the target, then do the other speaker. From then on the meter reads in dB SPL. The full procedure is in our monitor calibration guide.

Each output has a brick-wall limiter with adjustable threshold and release and 1 ms lookahead, so a DAW glitch or a hot new session cannot send a full-scale burst to your tweeters. A safety low cut, Linkwitz-Riley at 12, 24 or 48 dB per octave, keeps sub-bass energy away from small woofers. Limiter activity is shown on the meter. It acts on what passes through PHON: a DAW glitch, a hot session, a misbehaving plugin. It cannot act on anything that bypasses it or sits after it, such as an interface fault or a hardware gain change.

Swap, left only, right only, mid and side are one button each on the routing row, and mono sits on the numeric keypad or on any MIDI control you map to it. A correlation meter from −1 to +1 shows phase coherence continuously. The three low cut buttons, 80, 120 and 200 Hz out of the box, let you hear what a small speaker or a phone will keep of your low end. Each preset's frequency and slope can be changed in Audio Settings.

Yes. PHON ships with themes drawn from the palettes of Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Cubase, FL Studio and Reaper, plus a dark and a light theme, switched from the menu bar. The window can also stay on top of the session.

Yes. MIDI Learn maps any CC or note to any function: volume, mute, dim, source, output, routing mode and more. A small controller such as a Korg nanoKONTROL or Behringer X-Touch Mini gives you a physical volume knob; a Stream Deck sends MIDI for one-touch switching. The numeric keypad covers every monitoring action on its own, and the web remote works from any phone or tablet browser on your network.

No. On macOS 14.2 and later PHON captures applications directly through Core Audio taps, without a driver, a kernel extension or an aggregate device. Each source and each output is configured independently, so you can still use a virtual device or a hardware input where that suits you, for example a DAW routed through a virtual device on source A and Spotify captured per application on source B.

macOS 13 or later on Apple Silicon or Intel. Per-application capture needs macOS 14.2 or later; on macOS 13 you can use a virtual device or a hardware input as a source. PHON is a standalone application, not a plugin. A Windows version is in progress; per-application capture is a macOS facility and will not be part of it, so the Windows build will take its sources from hardware inputs and virtual devices. Subscribe below to be notified when it ships.

One purchase, one licence key by email, activation on up to two machines. The 14-day trial is the full application, with no credit card. Updates within version 1.x are free and arrive through the app.