In this article, Grammy-nominated producer and mixer Nathaniel Reichman takes Waves’ first foray in immersive plugins for a test drive. Over to Nathaniel…

I’ve been mixing in Atmos since 2017 and the last year has been a busy one. The content I work on is pretty dynamic so I’m picky about my limiters and the use of compression in general, since Atmos has so much headroom. Years ago, I invested in the Waves 360° Surround Tools, which were expensive and meant for mixers working in 5.1 surround sound. I put a lot of miles on the L360 limiter mixing TV shows. Hopefully, the new Waves’ Spherix Compressor and Limiter are just the beginning of a ‘Spherix’ suite of immersive plug-ins.

Usage & Sound

Until now, I have had a crude master section in my Pro Tools template which consists of multi-mono DMG Equality EQs and multi-mono Avid Pro Limiters on every 7.1.2 bed master; mono Equality and Pro Limiters on every object master. I use plug-in parameter linking as needed to match thresholds, etc. The downside of this approach is that the multi-mono limiter channels don’t speak to each other. In other words, each channel acts completely independently, so if I hit the threshold on the Ls channel, causing reduction (and pumping), the Rs channel doesn’t reduce in the same way it would if it were a standard (linked) stereo limiter. People have designed clever ways to get around this (a mono global sidechain of all channels summed), but I haven’t gone down this path.

Waves’ solution to the linking problem in both the compressor and limiter is to do all the 7.1.2 (or 7.1.4 if you’re using Logic or Nuendo) processing in one plug-in, with a brilliant ‘Weight’ control that lets you adjust the amount of channel linking happening in the compressor or limiter. Adjusting the weight parameter in the compressor while also adjusting the sidechain filters results in some very interesting-sounding options. For example, setting the sidechain filter fairly high, and turning the weight toward ‘individual’ is a great way to retain a powerful low-frequency sound, while tucking-in the mids and highs in a way that seems natural instead of pumpy.

Running an instance of Spherix Compressor on every bed master is a good workflow. It has a low delay compensation value and shouldn’t burden the CPU in an already large Atmos mix. That’s the good news. The bad news is that despite having all the cool features of Spherix Compressor, Spherix Limiter sounds exactly like the Waves’ L1 that came out in 1994! I put a few limiters up to do some sound comparison, and Waves L2, and L360 sound clear and powerful compared to the thin and grainy sound coming out of L1+ and Spherix Limiter. And let’s not even talk about Avid Pro Limiter which is lower distortion than L2…

Technical

I have some technical assessments of Spherix:

First, the out-of-the box Eucon mapping is superb. Global parameters are on the first page and every subsequent page is neatly formatted in predictable banks of eight. That said, ‘Auto Makeup’ and ‘Analog’ are missing but those are parameters one is likely to set and forget. I wish more plug-in manufacturers would prioritize Eucon-mapping the way Waves has recently (the Clarity Vx Pro mapping on my S3 was so good, I didn’t need to make a custom map for it).

Second, there is no multi-mono version of Spherix, so you can only use these plug-ins on beds and not on objects (to be fair the manual announces this plugin as “Spherix Immersive Compressor For Atmos Beds.”). Nevertheless, this is disappointing, because if you want the same sound and the same interface for doing dynamics control across all 128 channels (regardless of bed or object), you really can’t achieve it.

Third, the very cool-looking GUI doesn’t show numerical values unless you’re actually moving a knob. This is even more reason to use a control surface where you can see values but it strikes me as not being very professional.

Application

Apple Music and Spotify have worked hard to end the loudness war and in my opinion, Dolby has hammered the last nails in the coffin of the loudness war with their recommendation (and Apple’s requirement) to deliver Atmos music mixes that don’t exceed a long-term LUFS value of -18. That’s a lot of headroom compared to the mania we had in the stereo loudness wars.

There are creative reasons to squeeze the dynamic life out of a mix until it’s rolled-up incredibly tight, so we need great compressors and limiters to do this. But my approach to Atmos mixing has been to do this on a track-by-track basis, making some tracks very dynamically constrained, while allowing others to breathe a bit more. My use of multi-mono limiters across all my beds and objects has never been to create a ‘bus compression’ sound, but rather to catch errant objects that get suddenly loud, or for me to globally adjust my output parameters in order to hit spec.

Spherix Compressor sounds pretty good, so it’s making me rethink my workflow. I doubt I’ll use Spherix Limiter in post production projects though. One (possibly) terrific application of Spherix Limiter may be in live broadcasting where the dynamics of a bed might be very unpredictable.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for that ‘bus compression sound’ and can live with the “limitations” of Spherix, it’s a great, reasonably priced tool to achieve a little ‘glue’ in your Atmos mixes. I recommend it, and hope that this is just the beginning of a future Waves immersive suite of plug-ins.