My Slate VSX headphone system arrived today and I've been putting it through its paces. A few folks have asked me about them since mentioning them that I had a pair en route in two separate threads. I'm dropping my review here as opposed to directly in those threads. Let me preface this by saying that historically I've not been a fan of Steven Slate's products. I found VCC to be overrated and overhyped. The mix rack thing they use for their plugins annoys me in terms of functionality. I find his advertising and marketing to be really gimmicky and not as funny as he thinks it is. I also had a bad experience where Slate Digital customer service really got under my skin when they switched to the subscription model and I was trying to get support for a plugin that I bought prior to the subscription model even being a thing. I went into this VSX thing knowing full well that I was not a Slate fanboi by any stretch of the imagination. Quite the opposite. I also paid full price for these through
Sweetwater. Keep that in mind as you read on. Also keep in mind that I've been using the VSX system for one day, which is hardly conclusive. Further keep in mind that the promise of this product seems far too good to be true and given how much time and money I've put into my studio, I kind of don't want it to work.
First-off, it should be noted that this is a Slate Audio product, which is an entirely different company than Slate Digital. It's confusing and seems like an unnecessary distinction to me, but that's beside the point. The biggest thing to note about this is that Slate Audio products can use a software iLok registered to your computer, whereas Slate Digital requires a physical USB iLok dongle. I hate those little dongles. I hate the way they monopolize a USB port. I hate the way the older ones (I have an iLok2) would randomly not register on your system and make the plugins not authorize. I hate them. VSX, being a Slate Audio product allowed me to register the system to my computer as opposed to a dongle. Perfect.
On to the product itself. So, this should not be considered a pair of headphones. The headphones are simply the delivery method for a software package. The two are used together as a system. Don't buy these if you just want a nice pair of headphones. These are very nice headphones, but they're perhaps a little too flat for what most people would use headphones to do in a studio setting. More on that later, but suffice it to say that buying VSX just for the headphones would be like buying Reese's Peanut Butter cups just for the peanut butter. There are cheaper ways to get peanut butter if you don't want the chocolate. Likewise, VSX should not be separated into its two components. They're synergistic.
Binaural: The big deal here is that listening to a mix on a pair of speakers in a room is not a binaural environment. Your left and right ears aren't isolated from each other, and phantom center is a very real and important thing. Headphones are a binaural environment. The information that reaches the left ear does not reach the right ear, and there is no phantom center. The VSX system does some trickery and creates a faux non-binaural environment inside of the headphones. On my first listen I was admittedly shocked by how accurate the phantom center felt. In my studio, which (not to brag) is many times nicer than the vast majority of peoples' rooms here on Talkbass, phantom center is so perceptible that I have had people point to my more narrowly spaced nearfields as the sound source when the sound was actually coming from the midfields placed wider when listening to narrow sounds in the stereo field. I know what phantom center sounds like on a nice set of monitors in a heavily treated room. VSX nails it. When you use the VSX bypass everything snaps into the typical binaural sound and phantom center disappears. Engage VSX and there it is. There's also a depth control that defines how much of the room sound from each modeled studio space enters the sound which increases or decreases the amount of phantom center. This is VERY subtle and I was happy enough to leave it at noon, or full, or low. Super subtle. I'm admittedly shocked that they nailed the binaural and phantom center things so well.
Modeled spaces: They modeled three studios (NRG, Archon and Howie Weinberg's mastering room), a handful of headphones including some Senheiser models, a set of Apple Air Pods and one called HD-Linear that is reportedly ruler flat (more on that later), two cars for doing the infamous "car check" (a Tesla Model S and some Mercedes SUV), a dance club, an audiophile's listening space, and a boombox of some sort. The two studios each have nearfield, midfield and farfield monitor options and the documentation includes what they are. Everyone online absolutely raves about the Archon studio using the midfield monitors and on my initial uses I'm inclined to agree that it's probably the best all-around solution for mixing. I find the Howie Weinberg mastering room to sound dreadful and my experience matches what most online reviews say about it. A lot of great records have come out of that room so maybe there's some magic to it, or maybe the Slate VSX model of it is flawed in some way. I don't know either way. The headphones are interesting, most notably the HD-Linear model.
@JKos and I were discussing this over PM last night. When you put the VSX into bypass mode you're just hearing the headphones without the binaural processing or any of the room modeling. According to the manual this mode is supposed to be ruler flat in terms of frequency response. I don't know if it's truly ruler flat or not, and given how headphones work due to cabin loading, ear size, ear canal shape, etc. I don't think any headphones can truly ever be ruler flat. Still, it appears that these are indeed very very flat if the bypass and the HD-Linear model equate to the same thing. Evidently Slate is working on an update that will do the HD-Linear flat frequency response but with the added binaural processing in-place, which is excluded from all of the headphone models.
Putting these into practice I pulled up a mix that I completed recently that I feel is the best mix I've ever done. Due to COVID I don't have many clients at the moment, so this was a multitrack download from PureMix of Bryce Drew's Lucky Number. I did the mix entirely on my midfields with a few checks on my nearfields and if I may be so bold, it sounds better than the commercial mix you can hear of the song on Spotify. I spent a lot of time getting it right, and it appears that I did. Listening to my mix on the VSX using the Archon midfields sounds different than in my space, but there's very little I would change. My next step is going to be to try and mix something from the ground up using VSX and see how it translates. That's all that matters. Do mixes on these translate? Does mixing go faster and/or more smoothly on these than using my monitors? I'll know soon enough. My initial impression is that for the vast majority of folks who don't have the luxury that I do with a nice monitoring system in a heavily treated room that was purpose-built as a recording studio, these are going to be miles ahead of buying monitors and putting them in an untreated room.
More to come...
