The Phonitor kept me up 'till 3 am last night. Good thing I didn't have to get up early today.
I thoroughly read the manual and was playing around with the settings to understand what the Phonitor does and how they would be useful. I was somewhat familiar with the concept but was a bit skeptical the Phonitor could actually imitate a 2 channel listening experience through headphones that would be beneficial for a typical audiophile vs recording engineer. Boy was I surprised! After all, it was designed to do exactly that, to recreate a 2 channel listening simulation so a recording engineer could easily work on the Phonitor and simulate a recording studio with monitor speakers.
Driving my Audeze LCD-2Classic headphones, I settled on a 30 deg speaker angle with a setting of 3 on the crossfeed which sounded much like what I am used to in my previous 2 channel systems on familiar recordings and then adjust the "center level" depending on the recording to either push the center image back or bring it forward to my taste.
Keeping in mind the Phonitor does all of this in the "analog domain", that is one engineering feat! None of the settings, engaged or bypassed affected the sound quality in any significant way whatsoever. Gotta admire German engineering and ingenuity.
The end result was that with a recording after recording, the Phonitor recreated a 2 channel listening experience in my head with a realistic soundstage width and depth opening up in front of me (in my head of course) that is quite believable and made me forget I was wearing headphones at all.
I have not had a headphone listening experience like this ever before. None of the gimmicky cross feed circuitry sometimes offered on other headphone devices comes even close.
I am very surprised the Phonitor flew under the radar back in the day, I guess many thought it was a studio piece of gear and never explored the possibility of the outstanding sound quality and the brilliant engineering feat SPL achieved with eliminating the headphone ear fatigue and recreating a 2 channel listening atmosphere inside the headphones just like our ears are used to.