With millions of creative professionals working at home and without access to a proper studio or accurate acoustics, anyone mixing audio is forced to rely on a less-than-ideal environment. Lacking a suitable monitoring environment in order to produce and mix properly, this often means working with headphones. As a result, it is not possible to know what those sessions and mixes will sound like on other monitors and playback systems.
By offering extended 90-day demos on Abbey Road Studio 3 and Nx Virtual Mix Room over Headphones plugins, Waves is providing a test-drive for two products that can resolve these issues.
The Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin is a great solution for producing and mixing on headphones, in any location. It models the three-dimensional acoustics of Abbey Road Studios' flagship Studio 3 control room — emulating a carefully treated spatial acoustic environment over headphones. With the plugin, users can better predict how headphone productions will translate to speaker systems of all types and hear true-to-life spatial depth on headphones, almost with the same detail and panoramic sound image possible to hear sitting in the sweet spot of Studio 3.
With Abbey Road Studio 3’s diverse set of near-field, mid-field and far-field virtual monitors, users also get a professional reference environment on headphones, increasing their confidence that their sessions will translate to sound systems everywhere. The Abbey Road Studio 3 also delivers full 7.1 and 5.1 surround sound, modeled after the studio’s original surround setup. This unique plugin, used with any set of headphones, gives users an approximation of what makes Studio 3 one of the world’s best studio control rooms.
Likewise, the Waves Nx Virtual Mix Room over Headphones plugin recreates the acoustics of a high-end studio inside headphones. Powered by Waves' groundbreaking Nx technology, Nx Virtual Mix Room is a virtual monitoring plugin that delivers, on headphones, the same three-dimensional depth and panoramic stereo image users would be hearing from speakers in an acoustically treated room, letting them mix and monitor with greater confidence, giving a better representation of how their headphone mixes will translate to speakers.
To feel the benefits, users just need to insert the plugin on the master buss, and hear all the elements of their mix accurately laid out in space, just as they would in the sweet spot of a great-sounding professional mix room. With the Nx Virtual Mix Room plugin users can also mix for 7.1, 5.1 or 5.0 surround on regular stereo headphones. And Nx also includes the Nx Ambisonics component, which lets users monitor Ambisonics B-format audio for 360° and VR projects.
With 90 days to try those plugins, Waves is offering a unique opportunity for everyone to understand what these emulation technologies can offer, their limitations and benefits. After all, Waves has almost three decades of expertise in the development of psychoacoustic signal processing algorithms that leverage knowledge of human auditory perception and perceived sound quality.
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