Reply To: Can great mastering be achieved using headphones only with no speakers?

February 17, 2023 at 9:49 am #4944
Bob Katz
Keymaster

    Rich, I’ve heard it on the grapevine that Canopener plugin by GoodHertz is the Bees knees. But I would suggest that you do what I did with the Weiss and my EQ: Play just the left loudspeaker, that’s located at 30 degrees left, and switch back and forth between phones and speakers and adjust the crossfeed until the virtual position of the left image is subjectively at the same as the loudspeaker. This should be symmetrical when you switch to right. This helps tremendously.

    There is also the incredible new binaural translator from Virtuoso that I demonstrated to the San Francisco AES recently. We are preparing a video for playback and demonstration of Virtuoso which I’ll announce in the Events section of Digido Fora as soon as it’s available. Virtuoso presents an uncanny, very transparent (to my ears) picture of stereo loudspeakers IN FRONT OF YOU. I have not tried to mix or master yet with Virtuoso but it’s very promising and I urge people to try it and report back here. You may be able to get a demo of Virtuoso by applying at https://apl-hud.com/account/

    Virtuoso does immersive as well, producing an excellent binaural picture in headphones of  the Atmos speakers in space in just a set of headphones. I also demonstrated Atmos playback in my demo and it will soon be made available. We are living in interesting times!

    I don’t encourage people to mix or master on headphones as a primary thing, but consider remote recording of immersive audio, editing and producing on remotes, students learning how to mix, all kinds of applications. As I said, in an emergency at my place, using maybe the best headphones in the world — I had success. Your mileage may vary!