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Amazing New Tech, or Too Good To Be True?

The claim is that Waves' new NX Virtual Mix plugin and tracker allow you to mix in headphones, while keeping the spatial depth and richness of a live room. The tracker uses bluetooth to sense which direction your head moves and adjusts the stereo field accordingly.

Seems ultra cool but would it would as well as described? Could it be a game changer, taking away yet another limitation for ITB recording and mixing? What do you all think?

Nx Virtual Mix Room + Nx Head Tracker | Hardware | Waves
 
Unfortuneately this is along the same lines of the "corrective room eq" which is supposed to take out the modes in the room and correct for them with eq but it will never fix the modal decays which will still influence the response of the room. This plug in will never get rid of the unrealistic translation of frequency response, and may never reach a level of depth perception as a set of monitors set up in a well treated room, it will not fix your response on your headphones and will not fix ear fatigue that occurs in a very short amount of time using head phones. I would be interested to see the translation of depth perception and reverb tails but alas another marketing ploy set by the plug in market. My word of advice from my 6000 plus hours of studio experience in many environments including high end rooms, guerilla setups, world class gear, and total crap would be invest in some room treatment that you build yourself calculated to your room which saves a ton of money, invest in some acoustical physics books may I suggest the master handbook of acoustics by f Alton everest (one of the world's foremost acousticians), and a set of high end monitors such as focal solo6 or barefoot monitors or something in that price range tested to your pallete and your ears. If you must mix with headphones invest in closed backs, open back, and a few other sets bc they all will yield different results and learn how it translates to the real world. All of this software is trying to be is a compensation for mixing skills and general knowledge of translation or room acoustics. Just like they joke about talent there is no plug in for talent and there is no magical plug in for mixing skills or headphones. There is only the skill to know where your room has problems, what you can fix acoustically with treatment realistically and what you cannot (learn your room take waterfall plots treat accordingly, move monitors around find the best spot with the least amount of nulls live in this spot learn it on monitors and all your different monitoring sources), lastly monitor on different sources of play back such as bose or home speakers or even earbuds along with your monitors and headphones. I don't mean to rant at you I aim to give advice learn some of these things and save yourself the money to invest in real tools such as analog outboard gear, room treatment, worthwhile processing plug-ins such as dynamic spectrum mapper or slate trigger for sample replacement or waves renaissance compressor/ eq which is cheap and versatile. I have used books to gain skills and save money such as learning to build world class audio gear such as api, ssl, and neve and customize to my preferences or needs this saves a ton of money and allows me to allocate to other things that are very important such as monitor stands to decouple the speakers and give a more accurate bass response because it cannot resonate thru the floor or other surfaces (built those my self in a buddy's wood shop and stained them and designed them based off calculations I found thru reading). Learn these things and your mixes will get better I promise. Learn how your room lies to you and it will reward you immensely. Just my 2 cents take it or leave it.

Keep making music friends!
 
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As someone correctly building a new studio from the ground up AND as someone who has never tried this software I'll just say... I'm skeptical. Skeptical at best. Highly doubtful at least. These types of shortcuts around mixing in a well designed, well treated room with quality monitoring never seem to do as well as they suggest. I'm sure someday that will change, but I can't see it happening just yet. Maybe I'm wrong, and again this is purely speculative since I've never actually tried the software.
 
I think it's pretty neat stuff.

A midi bass will never be the same as a real one and is not a substitute for one. This tech is not a substitute for having a pro treated room and never will be, and I don't think that there are many ppl out there who would think that it is. What it does do, is allow for more ppl to access a world that is prohibitively expensive at times, as well as helping folks who don't have access to a pro treated room make better mixes for themselves.

I've done mixes on headphones that have come out pretty great and ones that have come out pretty bad. I've also done mixes in pro rooms that I've rented that have come out pretty terrible too. All the best engineers in the world play their mixes in various headphones, in their cars, etc... and these days, fewer and fewer ppl are listening to music in loudspeakers at all. It's a world full of headphone listeners out there and to me, that potentially makes it a world for headphone mixing.

Anyway, tl;dr I think it's pretty neat and I'd like to try it out. IMO, It's not a replacement for a studio - it's an additional piece of tech to help you make better mixes.
 
i agree with you super heavy fun but although more are using headphones to mix most of those engineers are running 2k plus in money into the headphones and then at least a grand into a headphone amp. There are an insane amount of factors that play into mixing with headphones that you must be cognizant of to create a good mix. Nothing will come close to high end nearfields or good midfields ever; but a great high end set of open back head phones can do wonders with a great headphone amp. There is a ton of misconception but there are some really great engineers that fully understand their limitations and can work around based off their experience. PS i have done mixes in some high end rooms that did not translate well and i have set up gear in a house with like 50k worth of high end gear and a few grand of treatment and some moving of monitors and monitor stands and produced some great mixes that turned out well (i did get to learn the room for a while and in one instance we setup same day recorded the tracks for the album over a months time then learned the room while mixing turned out to be one of my better projects to date!). Your mileage may vary i was just saying there are many things i would spend money on before this if i were to invest in studio equipment.