Headphones are great for checking details when you’re mixing, but to mix on them exclusively has always been a challenge - at least until now. Experience Nx FREE on your Chrome, FireFox or Edge browser: Listen to our playlist in immersive 3D audio using any headphones and hear the songs like. I checked out a beta version to listen to a commercial quad recording played back via Nx using the free VLC Player software, and it was surprisingly impressive. So, in my opinion, NX is a nice idea that just leaves something to be desired.Waves say they are planning to release a more consumer-oriented Nx application in the near future, to enhance general music listening or gaming when using headphones. The listener certainly won't have NX to use to hear what I hear. That got me thinking that maybe using the NX isn't such a good idea for mixing a song with headphone playback in mind. I'd be willing to bet more than half of listeners today are using ear buds or Beats headphones. The stereo image changes too, unexpectedly, but I'm not sure the change in EQ is a good thing. Anyway, the EQ changes when turning the plug-in on and off. Also, I turned off the head tracking, as that was more of a "look at that!" selling point than anything else. I ran some stereo mixes I'd done through the plug-in and wasn't sure what to make of it. I don't mix in surround, so the surround mode made little difference to me. While it does give you a different perspective than just using headphones alone, it's not quite what I was expecting. I bought the NX plug-in when it first came out, thinking it was a pretty neat solution to mixing on headphones. So here’s the example of the Stereo Drums I have in the song: So what I did was pan some mono elements around on surround tracks, and man it created an interesting mix. In this scenario, I am leaving the plugin enabled on my master output when I bounce out the track. Now here’s what I found really amazing, I could use the NX plugin to create a binaural or surround mix of my track. I was then able to pan the surround items around in the virtual surround space and hear them in my headphone mix. I tested this out by loading up a surround project in Logic, and then I added the Surround-Stereo component of NX onto my master channel. But bear in mind that it will be downmixing to stereo for your headphones, so you will only get the perceived idea of a surround image in your headphones, but it still sounds amazing. The best thing of all about this plugin is that it has surround components so that you can mix a surround project with headphones. You can adjust how wide apart you want the speakers and you can rotate them from 0–90 degrees apart, plus rotate them 360 degrees around your head placement. Then next to the Room Ambience parameter you have the speaker position where you can choose where to place your speakers. So depending on how big you want your virtual room, this can be easily adjusted. There’s the room ambience section where you can increase the room size by imposing more virtual room reflections. But try it out, maybe you won’t mind the phasing so much. So I actually preferred to switch the head tracking feature off even though it is impressive. But it did create some weird phasing issues on the sound when moving around. I found that it was cool using this head tracking feature, especially when you move your head around like 30–60 degrees and hear more coming out the one speaker than the other because your ear is perceived to be closer to that speaker. It creates a virtual sweet spot for you, and if you move around too much, you can easily reset this sweet spot to get the optimum mixing position in this virtual room. This is where this plugin shines-it uses Waves new advanced NX technology to replicate the sound of an actual room when you’re wearing your headphones. And because of this, what most often happens is that you over compensate on the mix elements like panning tracks too wide or applying too much reverb. This results in a sort of warped sense of the stereo image of the music you’re listening to on headphones. So what’s missing from headphones when you use them to mix is the natural depth of a room, and the natural reflections that occur. What NX does is it creates a virtual mix room for you when you’re using headphones. It works great, but there’s something extra that I really like with this plugin. So when I saw that Waves had released the NX plugin for mixing with headphones, I had to try it out. I know it’s not ideal, and I'd rather use studio monitors when possible, but I work a lot with headphones (to produce music when the baby sleeps, etc.), so anything that can improve this gets tested in my books. I’m constantly on the lookout for great tools to use for production when using headphones.
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