In this video for Production Expert, Tom Lowe takes a first look at dearVR MONITOR by Dear Reality — Your Perfect Virtual Mix Room.

dearVR MONITOR is the latest plug-in from the team at Dear Reality. Joining forces with the Sennheiser AMBEO team, the plug-in allows you to monitor an array of different formats up to 9.1.6 and 13.1 with a pair of headphones.

For anyone working in immersive formats such as Dolby Atmos looking to listen to their work in a perfect room, or check their mix in a real-world environment, this is a great tool. It should also appeal to anyone looking to venture into immersive audio, without having to outlay the expense of a multi-speaker system. Of course, there are also a large number of people now working from home where installing a suitable speaker system, or acoustically treating a room may not be an option.

Scott Kramer, who is Manager, Sound Technology at Netflix said this on LinkedIn about the new dearVR MONITOR plugin…

“I'm very excited for Dear Reality's Monitor plugin, which launched today. This is a very convenient way to monitor multichannel and immersive mixes in binaural, all within Pro Tools or the DAW of your choice!”

Unlike various other products that offer the experience of listening to multi-channel audio over headphones, dearVR MONITOR doesn't use modelling to recreate a specific space or studio. Instead, it provides the acoustic characteristics of a perfect mixing room, with five different options. These are:

The dearVR MONITOR audio examples below uses Binaural sound. Please wear headphones for the best experience.

Mix Room A

A truly perfect tuned mix room. Very short, linear reverberation time with almost no colourations.

Mix Room B

Another variant of Mix Room A with slightly broader room dimensions and livelier sound characteristics.

Mix Room Large

Larger Mix Room with increased speaker distance – perfectly suitable for immersive speaker setups with a height layer.

Analytic Dry

No reflections and no room response at all. Imagine a perfect anechoic room. Pure sound from the virtual loudspeakers.

Analytic Position

Few early reflections added for improved location and externalisation of audio sources. Optimal mix room to position objects in immersive speaker setups.

There are also various options which allow you to check your mix in common listening environments, which enables you to check how your mix will translate in the real world.

As well as these provided Scenes, you can delve in further to tweak the sound to taste with two additional controls labelled Ambience and Focus.

Ambience sets the amount of diffusion, and therefore vividness of the virtual mix room, whilst Focus Selects the right spot between overall colouration and localization and is based on the patented Clarity feature by Sennheiser AMBEO.

Conclusion

With the uptake of immersive audio formats ever-growing, tools like this are going to become increasingly important when it comes to post-production and music workflows. Without having to invest in additional hardware when starting out means learning the techniques required is now more accessible than ever before.

For those who do have immersive speaker setups, having the option to listen to mixes in settings such as home theatres and other environments to check to how a mix translates, or to work while on the go makes this a valuable tool to have.