Waves Audio is now shipping the new Waves Nx Ocean Way Nashville plugin, designed to bring the acoustic environment and monitoring system of the Ocean Way Nashville Studio control rooms to any pair of studio headphones.
Mixes monitored on headphones through the Nx Ocean Way Nashville plugin are designed to translate accurately to multiple audio systems and platforms, without issues that can plague mixes created on headphones.
Designed from the ground up by Ocean Way founder Allen Sides, the studios (now owned by Belmont University) were painstakingly planned and built to meet his vision of an optimum recording, mixing and monitoring environment. Sides closely supervised the development of the new plugin.
The control rooms in particular are designed to provide an accurate acoustic response that translates seamlessly to other listening conditions. Ocean Way Nashville’s spacious control rooms combine unusually large “sweet spots,” resulting from the rooms’ construction specs, with the Allen Sides-designed Ocean Way Audio HR1 and HR5 monitors, built for even dispersion across the room.
The Nx Ocean Way Nashville plugin is powered by proprietary Nx technology for immersive spatial audio. Nx uses channel crosstalk, inter-aural delays (ITD), filters (ILD), early reflections, and head motion tracking to replicate the immersive experience of hearing audio in the real world.
Coupled with precision measurements of the acoustic response at the original Ocean Way control rooms, the Nx algorithm is intended to deliver a faithful three-dimensional “out-of-head” representation of the original acoustic experience at Ocean Way.
As with all Nx software, the new plugin supports head tracking (via the user’s webcam or the dedicated Waves Nx Head Tracker Bluetooth device), for enhanced realism of the immersive three-dimensional effect.
“With Ocean Way, it was always about the sound,” Sides concludes. “In all the studios we built over the years, the single most important thing was the monitor systems. What this plugin gives you is the space to create a better mix. You can put on a set of headphones, and it sounds like you’re sitting in this amazing control room, with an amazing set of speakers in front of you. This is a phenomenally accurate reproduction of what we created at Ocean Way Nashville – a remarkable replication of what it sounds like to sit in my studio control room. I think it’s a valuable asset to anyone trying to define what a truly great mix is. It simply makes the mixing job easier.”
