Waves Nx Ocean Way Nashville plug-in for mixing on headphones

Waves Nx Ocean Way Nashville plug-in models the famous studio’s control room acoustics over any pair of studio headphones.

It’s an interesting concept – making headphones behave like speakers in an acoustically-designed control room, in this case the Ocean Way Audio HR1 far-field and HR5 near-field monitors.

There are several problems with mixing on headphones, and Waves’ Nx 3D spacial audio modeling algorithm is intended to solve them. One of the main differences between headphones and speakers in a room is that each headphone is isolated from the other, which means the inter-aural cues are missing.

Nx deals with those issues and others using channel crosstalk, inter-aural delays, filters, early reflections, and also head motion tracking. You can use a webcam, or there’s an optional Nx Head Tracker, a Bluetooth device that also works with Waves’ two other headphone-mixing plug-ins.

Nx Ocean Way Nashville lets you select the HR1 or HR5 monitors and adjust the studio ambience. It also offers personal head anatomy calibration.

Allen Sides, the studio’s well-known designer who took part in this project is impressed: