Waves Ocean Way/Abbey Road NX headphone plugins

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Ted
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Waves Ocean Way/Abbey Road NX headphone plugins

Post by Ted » Fri Feb 12, 2021 11:42 pm

Hey guys, been working on mixes. Only bought my first monitors last year and my studio space at my current apartment moves between two rooms depending on my mood-- so trying to do any kind of room treatment would be useless.

I'm using a combo of monitors and headphones, with most of my decisions coming from the headphones. I don't like using headphones much and hopefully some day I'll have a place with a treated room and all that. I was thinking of getting Sonarworks or ARC to fix my listening environment-- but last night I was looking at a Waves plugin sale and saw the Abbey Road Studio 3 and Ocean Way Nashville headphone mixing plugins and said "why not?". They looked interesting, though maybe somewhat gimmicky.

You use your computer's camera to track your head movements while wearing headphones and it creates the impression of sitting at the mixing desk of either of these studios listening on speakers-- with the sound changing as you move your head, like it would in the real world.

I gotta say, I love these. It really does feel like I'm sitting in front of speakers. Several times I got this sensation of "Oh shit, this must be blasting through my monitors, my neighbors are gonna kill me!" only to lift my headphones off to hear nothing. The Ocean Way is newer and I thought I liked the sound of it a little better,-- the Abbey Road sounds slightly darker-- but after spending hours with both, I like them both equally. You get that space and air that you can't get from headphones and that center imaging. It's remarkable how much it changes when you switch the bypass on and off. You can switch between nearfields and mains and that's a cool feature.

The GUI looks great on both-- blow it up to 200% and you feel like you're sitting in the actual studio-- and you can rotate the studio around, so you can face the back wall and see what the mix sounds like with your back to the speakers and the music blasting off the back wall-- kind of like hearing your music in a club.

The tracking is slightly glitchy using the camera. You can also buy a little bluetooth sensor for $100 that's supposed to work better-- and you can use both together for best results-- though I think the camera works well enough for my needs.

I had a real blast loading a bunch of the tracks I did this past year into my DAW and then auditioning them A/B style in Abbey Road and Ocean Way. Caught a lot of things mostly good (and a few bad) with my mixes.

Anybody else use these plugins? I'm impressed with these.

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Re: Waves Ocean Way/Abbey Road NX headphone plugins

Post by cosmicdolphin » Sat Feb 13, 2021 3:39 am

Sounds cool Ted. Whilst I don't think there's any replacement for a well treated room sometimes that's just not possible so things like this can be a big help and much better than not having anything.

I imagine things have moved on but about a decade ago I bought a Focusrite Pro24 DSP because it had this sort of tech built it and you could choose from several different styles of virtual monitors like NS10's - Genelecs - Adams. I never really got on with it that well to be honest and a few months later went the whole hog and got some measuring software, a measurement mic and built all the acoustic treatment panels and with some help from the Gearslutz forum for this kind of thing got my space ( which is a corner of a garage ) into pretty good shape. I moved house a couple of years later so all the acoustic treatment got moved here and I later added Sonarworks which made a big imrovement too.

I will be interested to hear your mixes once you've gotten used to it - Does the plugin know what headphones you use so it can compensate for those or not ? I think that was the issue back in the day with my Focusrite unit...it wasn't flat to start with so it was hard to get mixes to translate. Or maybe I just sucked at mixing 10 years ago :lol:

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Re: Waves Ocean Way/Abbey Road NX headphone plugins

Post by Ted » Sat Feb 13, 2021 9:25 am

Mark,

These plugins do have a headphone selection menu--although the selection is rather limited. They had the BeyerDynamic 880s and 990s but not the 770PRO-- which is a popular model-- and what I use. Hopefully Waves will add more headphone models. I saw where some guy on Youtube had his headphone frequency curve analysis from SonarWorks and was able to input that. For increased accuracy you can take a few measurements of the size of your head and drop those numbers into the settings.

The monitor modeling software sounds interesting. I have an IK plugin called "Mic Room" that supposedly models several world class mics. You tell it what mic you're using and what mic you want to emulate-- but again, it's really limited in the selection of users source mics- it doesnt have my Audio Technica condenser in there. I'm kind of tempted to plug in an SM58 dynamic and tell it to emulate a U87 though. Haha.

I envy you being able to have a dedicated mixing area. In my previous apartment, I had a huge bedroom that was ideal for a home studio-- but the rent was ridiculously high. In my current apartment, my bedroom is literally like one foot too small to fit my bed and my studio desk in there comfortably. It makes me so mad. I can technically work like that but it's so cramped I can't lean back in my chair. With the economy and Covid stuff being what it is, I don't know if I've ever be able to afford a house. Like I mentioned in another thread this week, I recently started a small side business that could actually be quite profitable.

I've been lurking on Gearslutz lately. :)

This past week I also plunked down for Izotope's Music Production Suite 4. I already had standard versions of stuff like Ozone 9 and Neutron 3, though I used Ozone some and Neutron never. I got annoyed the other day at a comment about one of my mixes (I mean, they weren't WRONG, haha) so I did a trial of Neutron Advanced and used the Mix Assistant-- and I couldn't believe how much more balanced the mix was. So I upgraded to the Suite 4 and I'm really liking it. It came with a year subscription to Groove3 so I'm starting to watch some tutorials to learn how to use all this stuff. I already wanted VocalSynth 2. The Neoverb is really nice. Some of the mastering presets in Ozone are amazing. I know you use the Tonal Balance 2 plugins so that was a factor in my decision to get this software.

Of course, now my workflow has changed completely. Up til now I did not really treat the mixing stage as a separate project. Now I'm taking my raw tracks and exporting them to a fresh Logic X project to mix them. There are some advantages to doing it like that, as well as challenges-- especially as it pertains to maintaining organization, which is not my strongest suit.

I'll definitely let you hear some of my more recent mixes. I know I'll have room for improvement for a long time, but if I can use some of this software to get me hearing what a decent or good mix of my music sounds like, it should help get my ears closer to where they need to be.

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Re: Waves Ocean Way/Abbey Road NX headphone plugins

Post by MBantle » Sat Feb 13, 2021 12:11 pm

I am working in a very bad room myself and use a physical hardware cross-feed that works very well (https://spl.audio/en/spl-produkt/control-one/) + Sennheiser HD650 which are considered one of the best pair of headphones you can actually 'trust'. I am not very fond of the respective plugins (I tested Waves, Sonarworks, Can-Opener and Morphit) but if they work for you that is great.
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Re: Waves Ocean Way/Abbey Road NX headphone plugins

Post by Ted » Sat Feb 13, 2021 1:44 pm

MBantle wrote:
Sat Feb 13, 2021 12:11 pm
I am working in a very bad room myself and use a physical hardware cross-feed that works very well (https://spl.audio/en/spl-produkt/control-one/) + Sennheiser HD650 which are considered one of the best pair of headphones you can actually 'trust'. I am not very fond of the respective plugins (I tested Waves, Sonarworks, Can-Opener and Morphit) but if they work for you that is great.
Cheers,
Matt
Matt, thanks for the link-- that looks like a nice piece of gear. I've heard great things about those Sennheisers too.

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Re: Waves Ocean Way/Abbey Road NX headphone plugins

Post by MBantle » Sat Feb 13, 2021 1:52 pm

Ted wrote:
Sat Feb 13, 2021 1:44 pm
MBantle wrote:
Sat Feb 13, 2021 12:11 pm
I am working in a very bad room myself and use a physical hardware cross-feed that works very well (https://spl.audio/en/spl-produkt/control-one/) + Sennheiser HD650 which are considered one of the best pair of headphones you can actually 'trust'. I am not very fond of the respective plugins (I tested Waves, Sonarworks, Can-Opener and Morphit) but if they work for you that is great.
Cheers,
Matt
Matt, thanks for the link-- that looks like a nice piece of gear. I've heard great things about those Sennheisers too.
The Sennheisers are great. Low end is not their strong suit though. I have a pair of (rather affordable) Shure SRH840 at hand all the time - they behave astonishingly similar to the Sennheisers on some of the bands and deliver an emphasised low end so my middle ground is kind of a best of both worlds if that makes sense.
Cheers,
Matt

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Re: Waves Ocean Way/Abbey Road NX headphone plugins

Post by RPaul » Mon Mar 08, 2021 7:38 pm

I also use the Waves NX stuff, and slightly prefer the Nashville Ocean Way version. I don't use a camera, nor do I have one of the exact headphone models they support for adjusting EQ, but they note that isn't the main point -- it is getting that speakers feeling, which helps for judging ambience, especially. Also the different virtual speaker responses help in judging different parts of your mix. My headphone model is the same brand as one of those they do support, perhaps a slightly different vintage, so I use the one they do support occasionally to get a different perspective (it brings out the low end more), but use it without the headphone model setting most of the time.

As for the mic modeling stuff, I haven't used the IK plugin much, but Antares Mic Modeler was a lifesaver for me prior to getting my current mic (Studio Projects C1). The mic I had at the time (CAD Equitek E200) sounded great for the female singers I recorded with it, but it was a very bad match for my voice, bringing out the undesirable aspects. Mic Modeler did support the CAD mic, so I could use it as my source mic and try various other models for the target. I mostly gravitated toward a Neumann U87 model, though I'd occasionally use others. Along the way, I'd heard some well-respected engineers raving about my current mic, which they said had characteristics like the U87, so, when I was finally ready to spring for another mic, I bought one, and it ended up working well with my voice (I've still never tried a real U87). The C1 isn't supported by Mic Modeler, so, if I want to try another model, I just say my source is a U87. :)

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Re: Waves Ocean Way/Abbey Road NX headphone plugins

Post by Ted » Tue Mar 09, 2021 4:11 pm

Yeah, it's not really necessary to use the headtracker function since you can use the mouse and rotate the room. Like I said, I like the ability to turn the listener's position 180 degrees from the monitors and hear it blasting off the back wall. I'm finding that I find more flaws in my mixes when I'm not in front of the monitors, but rather when I walk into another room from the one where the music is playing.

I'll have to play around with the IK Mic Room some-- I guess I can apply it to vocal tracks I've already recorded and see if it makes a difference.

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Re: Waves Ocean Way/Abbey Road NX headphone plugins

Post by RPaul » Tue Mar 09, 2021 5:46 pm

Ted wrote:
Tue Mar 09, 2021 4:11 pm
Yeah, it's not really necessary to use the headtracker function since you can use the mouse and rotate the room. Like I said, I like the ability to turn the listener's position 180 degrees from the monitors and hear it blasting off the back wall. I'm finding that I find more flaws in my mixes when I'm not in front of the monitors, but rather when I walk into another room from the one where the music is playing.

I'll have to play around with the IK Mic Room some-- I guess I can apply it to vocal tracks I've already recorded and see if it makes a difference.
Yeah, I've done some of the manual turning stuff with NX -- I remember seeing that recommended for helping turn up different things -- in addition to trying the various speakers. I also lower the volume quite a bit at times to help ferret out high-level balance issues (not only with NX, but also when using my monitors), and listen in mono (albeit through stereo speakers or headphones since those are what I have). Every little bit helps, but I've definitely found that, since having started using Abbey Road Studio 3 and Nx Ocean Way Nashville, my car listening tests seem to be turning up fewer issues than they used to. And with my driving typically being limited to once a week to and from the grocery store (on the order of 10 minutes, plus or minus a little depending on traffic and lights), that is a very good thing. :)

Yeah, the Mic Room (or the more powerful Mic Modeler) stuff is definitely good for after the fact experimentation. At worst case, it can be like trying out some different EQ curve-like settings, though there is more than simple EQ curve involved since proximity can be a variable on both source and target ends (at least in Mic Modeler, though I think also in Mic Room), as well as any switches the relevant mics use (at least in Mic Modeler), such as whether a highpass filter is engaged or not, and, if a mic has those features, different settings of the filters. Mic Modeler also has a built in preamp simulator, that you can use to go from relatively transparent to pretty saturated. While I don't typically use those plugins on my stuff now, since my mic works pretty well with my voice, I do occasionally use them to simulate different mics on different background vocals, really with the intent of varying up the tone to make it more like different voices. (Sometimes I also shift formants a bit for that.) Mind you, not all that frequently, but occasionally it is helpful.

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Re: Waves Ocean Way/Abbey Road NX headphone plugins

Post by Ted » Wed Mar 10, 2021 7:01 am

Last night, I decided to go to the most recent track I've been working on and insert the IK Mic Room into the vocal channel and see if it had any effect. My source mic is an AT 4033 and I wasn't sure what mic to select, so I just set the goal mic to be a U87 and then switched the source mic options til I found the best sound. I did actually find some combinations that improved my vocal track-- very subtle, but the U87 emulation did put a dash of that fairy dust smoothness onto my vocal.

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