Every SG-01 profile starts in the studio and ends in a room that does not care about the studio. This one was a 3,000-capacity floor in Seoul, two nights of a tour we like, with a system that hits 104 dB at the mix position and about 98 at the back bar. The brief was simple: make the adaptive ANC behave when the room is louder than any lab we own.
We brought twelve pairs, one laptop, a measurement mic and a crate of ear pads. Ten of the pairs went on people who work the floor: bar, security, the lighting desk, two techs from the crew. Two stayed with us. Everyone wore the same firmware build, and everyone was asked to do nothing special. Work the shift. Tell us when it annoyed you.
What the room does
A loud room is not loud in one way. Sub energy sits under 80 Hz and moves through the shell as much as through the air. Vocals arrive twice, once from the array and once off the back wall, forty milliseconds late. And every ten minutes something unexpected happens: a snare hit, a crowd surge, the fire door opening onto the street. The old profile treated all of that as one noise floor and clamped down on everything. It felt like being underwater.
The new profile splits the job. Below 120 Hz the ANC works hard and stays predictable; that is where the fatigue comes from. Above that it eases off and lets the room in at a level the driver can render cleanly, so a voice at the bar still sounds like a voice. The switch between the two states is where we spent most of the night, because a switch you can hear is worse than no switch at all.
Twelve pairs, eight notes
The notes were short and useful. The lighting desk wanted transparency to hold on a double tap without a hand on the cup. Security wanted the low band even lower; they stand closest to the subs. Two people said the pads got warm after ninety minutes, which we knew and are fixing with the next pad material. Nobody mentioned the sound, which is the review we want.
If I forget I am wearing them, you have done your job. I forgot around midnight.
Floor security, night one
The profile that shipped in the 2.3 firmware is the one from night two with one change: the transparency hold, which turned out to be a one-line fix. If you own a pair, it is already on them. If you work loud rooms for a living, Loud Floor is the profile to pick in the app, and we would like to hear what it does in yours.
Next stop is a smaller room with a worse PA. Those are the ones that actually hurt.
