Slate VSX Comparison to My Studio

[silky smoove]

Cross posting here and on Gearspace.

Today I finished a test where I took a multitrack project from Cambridge (the edited excerpt of “Stitch Up” by Bobby Nobody that’s been floating around for years), setup all of the session routing, decided which plugins I was going to be allowed to use on each channel and buss, and then mixed the song from the ground up separately on my monitors, then on each of the mix rooms in Invalid Link Removed. The goal wasn’t to match the sound of the mixes, it was simply to get to what I would consider a good first mix revision in each room. I setup the routing and plugins in advance to keep things somewhat apples to apples but I was able to tweak all plugins, channel faders, panners, etc. as desired within each session until I was happy with the result. A better test would have been to start from scratch each time but that sounded more like labor than fun to me, so I opted not to go that far.

Archon: My usual starting point is this room’s midfields. After completing my test I think that might have been because they sound the “nicest” out of the bunch which isn’t necessarily helpful. This room’s nearfields are a revelation in revealing bee hives hiding in distorted guitar tones. Ultimately this room faired the worst in my translation test (with one caveat that I explain at the very end of this overly long post) despite it being my usual favorite. It’s always good to challenge your own biases.

Howie: I wasn’t going to include this room initially but decided to after the fact. It’s such a confounding room. It revealed some bass guitar incoherency problems as well as making me realize that the transients on the kick and snare were lacking despite being sufficiently loud in the mix. Ultimately this was my favorite mix translation despite being my least favorite starting point.

NRG: I usually favored other choices than this one prior to this test. It’s always been a room that didn’t feel particularly revealing of any common problems and also never felt terribly exciting. Despite that this ended up being the second best room for translation in my test. I need to spend more time here as it’s clearly more of a workhorse than I’ve given credit for in my time as a Invalid Link Removed owner (Founders Edition owner, so… for however long that’s been).

Sonoma: I’ve admittedly not spent much time in this room since it was added in the 2.0 update. I really should have. It’s a wonderful space. Having just two monitor choices can be a benefit as it keeps you from being overwhelmed with choice. It feels like the opposite to Steven’s room in terms of liveliness versus dead’ness. It’s very dry and admittedly I struggled to get reverbs and delays to work well at first. There’s a certain midrange magic in this room that I liked quite a bit and ultimately I was pleased with the translation. It wasn’t my favorite or even my second favorite but I’d say it came in with a strong third place showing in this little experiment.

Steven: Such a polarizing room. I have a pair of MixCubes in my studio and their representation here feels spot on. The Barefoots feel very hyped down low and up high to me. They can seem to over exaggerate certain frequencies. I could see this being a helpful tool but not one that I find pleasant to listen to when mixing. Maybe that’s the point. The far fields, who’s manufacturer I can’t recall off-hand, are very pleasant to listen to. Maybe too pleasant. It’s a room of extremes to my ears. Where this room absolutely shines is in its very lively decay times. If your mix sounds a little too ambient, particularly with reverb and delay tails, when listening in this room, it’s all but guaranteed to be a translation mess when it gets out in the real world. I love this room for those particular checks. For my test the translation in this room was better than Archon but not by much which put it near the bottom of the list but still with some very good utility.

Lastly, and perhaps most disappointingly, I also did a mix on my monitors. I have a small 13’ wide by 19’ long project studio. It’s heavily treated, has vaulted ceilings, well placed monitors and a mix position right in the sweet spot. My monitors, while nothing special are decent. I have a pair of ADAM F7s paired with an ADAM Sub8. I also have a pair of Avantone MixCubes as an alternate. Every single room in Invalid Link Removed beat out the mix I did on my monitors. They were all close enough that it wasn’t night and day in any case, but my “real” monitors in my room that I spent tens of thousands of dollars constructing (including the construction of the structure and sound isolation measures as well) ultimately couldn’t keep up with a product that I spent less than $500 to buy. Steven has given the community an absolute treasure in this product.

Amendment: Here’s a link to the results. None of these would be final or even ready for client delivery to get a first round of comments. None are mastered. Some have problems, some of those problems are significant. Still a good first run through comparison based on my ramblings above.

[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]

 

[mike buzzetti]

Interesting Idea with the VSX ! Ill take a listen later

 

[DirtDog]

Cross posting here and on Gearspace.

Today I finished a test where I took a multitrack project from Cambridge (the edited excerpt of “Stitch Up” by Bobby Nobody that’s been floating around for years), setup all of the session routing, decided which plugins I was going to be allowed to use on each channel and buss, and then mixed the song from the ground up separately on my monitors, then on each of the mix rooms in Invalid Link Removed. The goal wasn’t to match the sound of the mixes, it was simply to get to what I would consider a good first mix revision in each room. I setup the routing and plugins in advance to keep things somewhat apples to apples but I was able to tweak all plugins, channel faders, panners, etc. as desired within each session until I was happy with the result. A better test would have been to start from scratch each time but that sounded more like labor than fun to me, so I opted not to go that far.

Archon: My usual starting point is this room’s midfields. After completing my test I think that might have been because they sound the “nicest” out of the bunch which isn’t necessarily helpful. This room’s nearfields are a revelation in revealing bee hives hiding in distorted guitar tones. Ultimately this room faired the worst in my translation test (with one caveat that I explain at the very end of this overly long post) despite it being my usual favorite. It’s always good to challenge your own biases.

Howie: I wasn’t going to include this room initially but decided to after the fact. It’s such a confounding room. It revealed some bass guitar incoherency problems as well as making me realize that the transients on the kick and snare were lacking despite being sufficiently loud in the mix. Ultimately this was my favorite mix translation despite being my least favorite starting point.

NRG: I usually favored other choices than this one prior to this test. It’s always been a room that didn’t feel particularly revealing of any common problems and also never felt terribly exciting. Despite that this ended up being the second best room for translation in my test. I need to spend more time here as it’s clearly more of a workhorse than I’ve given credit for in my time as a Invalid Link Removed owner (Founders Edition owner, so… for however long that’s been).

Sonoma: I’ve admittedly not spent much time in this room since it was added in the 2.0 update. I really should have. It’s a wonderful space. Having just two monitor choices can be a benefit as it keeps you from being overwhelmed with choice. It feels like the opposite to Steven’s room in terms of liveliness versus dead’ness. It’s very dry and admittedly I struggled to get reverbs and delays to work well at first. There’s a certain midrange magic in this room that I liked quite a bit and ultimately I was pleased with the translation. It wasn’t my favorite or even my second favorite but I’d say it came in with a strong third place showing in this little experiment.

Steven: Such a polarizing room. I have a pair of MixCubes in my studio and their representation here feels spot on. The Barefoots feel very hyped down low and up high to me. They can seem to over exaggerate certain frequencies. I could see this being a helpful tool but not one that I find pleasant to listen to when mixing. Maybe that’s the point. The far fields, who’s manufacturer I can’t recall off-hand, are very pleasant to listen to. Maybe too pleasant. It’s a room of extremes to my ears. Where this room absolutely shines is in its very lively decay times. If your mix sounds a little too ambient, particularly with reverb and delay tails, when listening in this room, it’s all but guaranteed to be a translation mess when it gets out in the real world. I love this room for those particular checks. For my test the translation in this room was better than Archon but not by much which put it near the bottom of the list but still with some very good utility.

Lastly, and perhaps most disappointingly, I also did a mix on my monitors. I have a small 13’ wide by 19’ long project studio. It’s heavily treated, has vaulted ceilings, well placed monitors and a mix position right in the sweet spot. My monitors, while nothing special are decent. I have a pair of ADAM F7s paired with an ADAM Sub8. I also have a pair of Avantone MixCubes as an alternate. Every single room in Invalid Link Removed beat out the mix I did on my monitors. They were all close enough that it wasn’t night and day in any case, but my “real” monitors in my room that I spent tens of thousands of dollars constructing (including the construction of the structure and sound isolation measures as well) ultimately couldn’t keep up with a product that I spent less than $500 to buy. Steven has given the community an absolute treasure in this product.

Amendment: Here’s a link to the results. None of these would be final or even ready for client delivery to get a first round of comments. None are mastered. Some have problems, some of those problems are significant. Still a good first run through comparison based on my ramblings above.

[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]

I’m not sure whether I should laugh or cry for you Silky.

 

[silky smoove]

I’m not sure whether I should laugh or cry for you Silky.

Why do you say that?

 

[DirtDog]

Why do you say that?

well, all the work you put into your studio only to have a $500 piece of software outperform it. I’d shed a tear or two.

 

[mike buzzetti]

well, all the work you put into your studio only to have a $500 piece of software outperform it. I’d shed a tear or two.

That kinda sucks but just because this came out ( great Idea BTW ) does not mean its actually usable in real world , time will tell.

 

[silky smoove]

well, all the work you put into your studio only to have a $500 piece of software outperform it. I’d shed a tear or two.

Well, context is important with that comparison. It's only outperformed in terms of a mix translation solution. The studio I built is also for recording where these and monitors in general are fairly non-critical aside from doing tone checks before hitting the record button. In addition to that I rehearse out of the studio and since the onset of the pandemic it has also doubled as my work-from-home location for my day job, which also happens to be in engineering, haha.

To be pointed at the mix translation solution; If I were to step up my monitoring to something in line with the speakers modeled in the rooms found within VSX (ATC, ProAc, Barefoot, Amphion, etc.) I'm sure I could close that gap, but at a significant expense that could be allocated elsewhere (more preamps, more instruments, more microphones, more anything).

That kinda sucks but just because this came out ( great Idea BTW ) does not mean its actually usable in real world , time will tell.

Time doesn't need to tell on whether or not it's usable in the real world. It is. Anyone using it immediately has a very high level monitoring solution. No further proof of concept is required. It's been out for a few years now and has been an overwhelming success for Slate which only serves as further proof of concept in terms of market acceptance. See the offerings that Acustica Audio, Waves and dSONIQ either rolled out or immediately worked to improve in the wake of VSX being released as yet another data point.

The one area where this won't work is Atmos mixing, but that's not a criticism of VSX it's a function of true Atmos mixing not being truly functional in a binaural environment despite the renderer offering a binaural encoding option. As such it applies to all headphones and non-Atmos monitoring configurations such as stereo, 2.1 or even 5.1.

 

[mike buzzetti]

Well, context is important with that comparison. It's only outperformed in terms of a mix translation solution. The studio I built is also for recording where these and monitors in general are fairly non-critical aside from doing tone checks before hitting the record button. In addition to that I rehearse out of the studio and since the onset of the pandemic it has also doubled as my work-from-home location for my day job, which also happens to be in engineering, haha.

To be pointed at the mix translation solution; If I were to step up my monitoring to something in line with the speakers modeled in the rooms found within VSX (ATC, ProAc, Barefoot, Amphion, etc.) I'm sure I could close that gap, but at a significant expense that could be allocated elsewhere (more preamps, more instruments, more microphones, more anything).


Time doesn't need to tell on whether or not it's usable in the real world. It is. Anyone using it immediately has a very high level monitoring solution. No further proof of concept is required. It's been out for a few years now and has been an overwhelming success for Slate which only serves as further proof of concept in terms of market acceptance. See the offerings that Acustica Audio, Waves and dSONIQ either rolled out or immediately worked to improve in the wake of VSX being released as yet another data point.

The one area where this won't work is Atmos mixing, but that's not a criticism of VSX it's a function of true Atmos mixing not being truly functional in a binaural environment despite the renderer offering a binaural encoding option. As such it applies to all headphones and non-Atmos monitoring configurations such as stereo, 2.1 or even 5.1.

I thought it was a brand new product ! see what happens when you assume ??

 

[Bonafide]

well, all the work you put into your studio only to have a $500 piece of software outperform it. I’d shed a tear or two.

Not in the least. The VSX is a fantastic support, offering multiple mixing environments/monitors for referencing. It is an equal support in studios with exceptional monitoring. Not to mention monitors are used for all manner of work and utility and in the end, knowing your monitors and knowing the room you are in is the greatest chance of success, granted the room has basic acoustics managed. As it turns out, in my own small mixing environment, for better or worse, Sonoma is a close to dead match. It does make it useful to contrast with other rooms on the fly. In the end I still use my room, but the VSX is basically effortless.

That kinda sucks but just because this came out ( great Idea BTW ) does not mean its actually usable in real world , time will tell.

I have been using VSX-FE since October 2020. It has been both fun and enjoyable and it was instantly identifiable as a useful tool, more useful than a 3rd set of monitors which I briefly employed. I ignored it at first announcement as it seemed gimmicky by nature, but eventually bought it because my D-Box only supports 2 sets of monitors without an additional switcher. It's one the few actual 'game changers' in the industry as of late. Recommended.

 

[silky smoove]

I thought it was a brand new product ! see what happens when you assume ??

I always say "when you assume, everything ends up fine."

All told it's just a really good implementation of making headphones appear to be stereo, which they're not. No headphones are stereo. This results in a sort of faux/psuedo stereo that works surprisingly well. I tried Acustica Audio's Sienna as well as a couple of dSONIQ's offerings and was not as impressed, mostly because they're software meant to work with any set of headphones. VSX, by comparison, is software calibrated to a specific set of headphones and it specifically does not work properly with others. The Waves solution is interesting as it can be used with head tracking hardware to give you a better sense of immersion in the virtual space. All of these are a compromise based on the geometry and physiology of the human ear. If there were a premium option to calibrate the software to a custom HRTF profile for each user, which would require ear measurements performed by an audiologist, coupled with a reliable means of head tracking I would buy it tomorrow. We're not quite there yet, but this is as good as it gets for now as far as I'm concerned.

 

[mike buzzetti]

Not in the least. The VSX is a fantastic support, offering multiple mixing environments/monitors for referencing. It is an equal support in studios with exceptional monitoring. Not to mention monitors are used for all manner of work and utility and in the end, knowing your monitors and knowing the room you are in is the greatest chance of success, granted the room has basic acoustics managed. As it turns out, in my own small mixing environment, for better or worse, Sonoma is a close to dead match. It does make it useful to contrast with other rooms on the fly. In the end I still use my room, but the VSX is basically effortless.



I have been using VSX-FE since October 2020. It has been both fun and enjoyable and it was instantly identifiable as a useful tool, more useful than a 3rd set of monitors which I briefly employed. I ignored it at first announcement as it seemed gimmicky by nature, but eventually bought it because my D-Box only supports 2 sets of monitors without an additional switcher. It's one the few actual 'game changers' in the industry as of late. Recommended.

Good to hear , like I said I did not know it was out for that long , any time a new TECH comes along and make life better/easier is all good with me .

 

[silky smoove]

in my own small mixing environment, for better or worse, Sonoma is a close to dead match

Sonoma was a real surprise in my test. I kept avoiding that room ever since the 2.0 update last year. I've had mine since the initial release (Founders Edition headphones sitting just to my left as I type this) and I just never got along with Sonoma, or Steven's room for that matter. Something about Sonoma was just uninspiring to use. After giving it a fair shot, it's VERY revealing. The combination of ProAC and Amphion monitors in such a dead space is very useful. I think now that I've finished this test I'll end up using that room a lot more than before.