In this article, we give 3 ways to help you feel more confident about your mixes even when your room is less than ideal, or in some cases, you don’t have a room at all and need to mix on headphones.

Professional studios spend enormous amounts of time and money to design and treat their mix rooms, ensuring they deliver as flat a frequency response as possible. This is done to make sure the producers and mix engineers that work in these spaces are confident that the sound they hear is free from frequency response anomalies that can lead to a poor mix that doesn’t translate to other systems in other rooms.

But most of us don't have big studio budgets, and more so this year than ever, we've been forced to mix primarily or entirely on headphones, hoping that our mixes translate well to loudspeakers.

Various manufacturers have come up with innovative ways of processing an audio signal to reproduce - at least to some extent - the experience of listening in a flat or well-treated environment. They've been around for some time too, and include IK Multimedia ARC2, Flux: Hear, TB Isone, Beyer Dynamic Virtual Studio, and Focusrite VRM Box.

Focusrite's now discontinued VRM Box USB interface had a headphone output that featured their Virtual Reference Monitoring Technology. This concept first appeared in their Saffire Pro 24 DSP audio interface, and its advantages were recognized and repackaged in a stand‑alone box that integrated well with most studio systems with a spare USB port. This little box was handy and affordable, but it failed to integrate well with other audio interfaces. The primary value was to create a convincing 'speaker-like listening experience on headphones and provide portability for laptop mixing.

What has followed is a decade of technological advancements, in this article, we're going to look at three of the best room correction and headphone mixing solutions that can give you greater confidence that your mixes will translate across multiple playback systems.

Waves Nx – Virtual Mix Room Over Headphones

Powered by Waves' Nx technology, Virtual Mix Room is a monitoring plugin that delivers the acoustics of a high-end studio inside, on headphones. Nx lets you translate to speakers by inserting the plugin on your master buss, giving the same three-dimensional depth and the panoramic stereo image you would be hearing from speakers in an acoustically treated room.

Nx includes the Nx Ambisonics component, which lets you monitor Ambisonics B-format audio for 360° and VR projects on your regular stereo headphones. Nx Ambisonics features a spatial meter representing your tracks' frequency content in every direction of the spherical 360° sound field. Nx does all this without colouring your sound or introducing any artefacts. What you hear is your mix, exactly the way you want it to sound – only now you have a more accurate way to monitor it on headphones.

Nx also includes a Headphone EQ calibration feature, allowing you to select a correction EQ curve for specific headphone models. Based on precision headphone measurement data provided by www.headphone.com, these EQ curves are designed to balance out any extreme features in the frequency response, correcting them toward a common frequency balance and providing a more transparent starting point for monitoring and mixing.

The Nx technology has spawned further Waves products, including The Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin which brings the acoustic environment of Abbey Road Studio 3 control room to your headphones, based on precision 360° impulse response measurements of the Studio 3 control room.

Slate Audio VSX Headphone System

The VSX from Steven Slate Audio is the latest virtual mixing system that allows you to create your music in precise models of pro mixing studios, mastering rooms, car stereos, nightclubs, audiophile mix rooms and boomboxes, over headphones

The VSX headphone system accomplishes this by utilising a hybrid system combining a beryllium driver headphone (powered by Scaeva Technologies), and a binaural perception modelling plugin that realistically recreates the way that humans hear speakers, delivering a flat, linear, and ultra-HD response. 'Acoustic Ported Subsonics' as the brand name it, help produce sub frequencies that you would hear in a nightclub or on a (really loud) car stereo.

Apart from emulations of studios, car stereos and boomboxes, the VSX system also models an audiophile listening room and even other popular headphone models. The SA-650 model emulates the Sennheiser 650s; the SA-770 takes after the Beyerdynamic 770, and SA-PODs mimic Apple Earbuds and Airpods.

The VSX plugin uses Steven Slate Audio’s Binaural Perception Modeling (BPM) algorithms to precisely reproduce the 3D sound of these mix rooms. With the Level Match Bypass feature, you can compare your mix at the same level along with the VSX HD-Linear emulation, which flattens the bypassed signal.

Sonarworks Reference 4

Sonarworks Reference 4 allows you to create listening environments that allow for a consistent mix experience at home, in the studio, or in your headphones. Reference 4 integrates seamlessly into the output of your computer, the software can accommodate multiple EQ profiles that you can switch depending on the monitors and headphones you work with. Reference 4 can be purchased with an individually calibrated measurement mic, which is used to measure impulse responses from positions in your studio environment. These responses calculate your rooms response curve and the software flattens the dips and bumps in the EQ curve generated by your speakers and how they are interacting with your space and find your sweet spot.

If you're working primarily on headphones, then Sonarworks Reference 4 Headphone Edition has calibration profiles for over 300 supported headphones. The software enables a flat frequency response curve when mixing on headphones - because all headphones colour the sound. They also provide averaged correction curves for lots of popular headphone models. You can, however, send your own headphones off to be calibrated by Sonarworks, and have them generate a specific custom curve for them, giving you extra confidence in your headphone mixes.

Once your system has been calibrated, Reference 4 also allows you to define your own custom profile profiles. If you like it a bit more bassy or trebly overall, then you can set that to taste. A few of the Expert team use sit-stand desks, and use Sonarworks to create switchable profiles depending on where you are -sitting or standing.

Final Thoughts

These systems, while all headphone based are all slightly different. Sonarworks doesn't attempt to mimic a physical space like Waves Nx or Slate Audio VSX Modelling Headphones. Reference 4 leads the way in correcting your room while using monitor speakers, allowing you to switch between multiple sets of speaker profiles. However, while mixing with headphones is possible, it has its downsides. For example, if you have closed-back headphones, the air pressure will change the way your ears respond to frequencies. You could pay for bespoke headphone calibration done by Sonarworks, where their unique process employs a transfer curve developed by experts that delivers sound signature as close as possible to what will be heard by humans when listening to neutral speakers. If you're working with artists, producers, or clients remotely, and the requirement is that you all hear the same environment, then Waves Nx or Slate Audio VSX Modelling Headphones may be better placed to do so.