Have a look at photos or footage from any professional recording studio from the pre-digital era, and what you’ll likely see are musicians wearing closed-back headphones while recording overdubs (so the music feed wouldn’t leak out of the cans and into the microphone, which would pollute the recording).
But headphones were not to be used for mixing due to the fact that mixes done on headphones tended to translate poorly to speakers. When I first started in music production over twenty years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that closed-back headphones could be used for monitoring during tracking and any type of headphones could be used for certain editing tasks. I found myself in a position where, if I wanted to work in my home studio while the baby was sleeping, headphones were my only option for monitoring. But can we rely on headphones for music production tasks like editing, mixing and even mastering? I went down this rabbit hole a few years ago when I became a new father. Cans are an attractive option for those who don’t want to disturb the neighboring apartments late at night or wake up the sleeping roommates. The post WAVES Nx VIRTUAL MIX ROOM PLUG-IN appeared first on AudioTechnology.Anyone who’s attempted to regularly produce music in a space shared with others who may not be particularly appreciative of being exposed to studio monitors blaring at 85+ dB for hours and hours on end has likely thought of using headphones as a monitoring alternative. At the very least, you’ll find it rather entertaining spinning the virtual speakers around your head.
Waves nx demo download#
Head over to download the free 14-day demo, and give it a whirl. I reckon it’s a justifiable purchase even if only as a quick mix-checking device. Regardless of the regularity of your headphone usage, Nx is still a great ‘hearing aid’ to have tucked in the toolbox for whenever monitors aren’t in reach. And if you’re not a heavy headphone user, then it’ll scarcely make it beyond your plug-in menu.īut if you’re a laptop producer or engineer who works primarily on headphones, then maybe Nx will help provide that extra bit of objectivity in levels judgment and stereo spread that’ll help improve your mixing consistency.
Waves nx demo how to#
Personally, I’ve learnt over time how to compensate for the anomalies imposed by headphone mixing - so I can’t say Nx will revolutionise my production quality. The soundscape Nx creates is very reminiscent of a binaural recording - it’ll even present 5.1 surround mixes on cans!īut does it improve your mixes? It depends.
The Room Ambience controls let you alter the amount of reflections and trim the centre level. You can graphically adjust the virtual speakers’ width and position, and even place them behind your head. There are plenty of settings that let you tailor your virtual acoustic environment.
The overall effect is the comparative ‘blurriness’ you’d get from hearing real speakers in a real room, and Nx manages to present this quite naturally. The stereo spread narrows, the centre image softens, and you’re transported into a world filled with pseudo-room reflections and artificial depth. Pop Nx onto your master bus and you’ll hear the difference immediately. Namely, a dramatically wide stereo image, unconventional amount of detail, lack of ‘crosstalk’ between left and right channels, and the absence of any room reflections mingling with the direct sound before arriving at your eardrums. Waves’ new Nx plug-in is designed to marry the paradigms of headphone and speaker monitoring by maintaining the convenience and privacy of headphones while rectifying the deceptive auditory world they put you in. Then I chucked it on some speakers and, to my dismay, the levels were all out of whack, effects were overblown, and anything panned centre was way too loud. I remember when I first tried producing a song entirely on cans - the track was bangin’, everything felt big and wide, the vocals cut through like a knife.
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