Waves CLA Nx Virtual Studio Control Room with Nx Head Tracker

Product Description

Waves CLA Nx brings Grammy-winning mixer Chris Lord-Alge's famed Mix LA studio control room to any pair of headphones – so you can monitor reliably on headphones and make better mixing decisions anywhere, anytime.

After faithfully modeling Chris’s console and classic hardware gear in previous plugins, Waves and CLA have finally teamed up to replicate Chris’s room acoustics and monitoring system. The CLA Nx plugin combines Waves Nx spatial audio technology with precise measurements of Mix LA, to model the acoustic response of Chris’s mix room inside any set of headphones.

Built by premier studio designer Vincent Van Hoff, Mix LA has been Chris Lord-Alge’s studio since 2008. This is the room he has trusted to deliver mixes for Bruce Springsteen, Green Day, Muse and countless top artists.

Chris’s complete monitoring setup is now available over any headphones via CLA Nx. This includes the acoustic response of Chris’s NS10-modeled CLA-10 nearfield monitors, coupled with his subwoofer system; his custom-built Ocean Way farfield speakers, modified to his specs; and even the boombox model he relies on to check how his mixes will translate to small-speaker devices.

With CLA Nx you can:

• Trust your headphone mixes to translate reliably to diverse sound systems
• Reference your tracks on an expertly calibrated monitoring environment
• Make better decisions on headphones about mix depth, stereo imaging, low-end response, reverb amount & more

If your room doesn’t have great acoustic treatment – now you can monitor through CLA’s expertly designed Mix LA acoustics on your headphones. Even if you do have a well-treated mix room – CLA Nx gives you another great reference environment to check your mixes.

CLA Nx is powered by Waves’ pioneering Nx technology for immersive spatial audio. Waves 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. All these are coupled with precision acoustic measurements of Mix LA, to deliver a faithful three-dimensional “out-of-head” representation of the real room.

CLA Nx also supports head tracking – via your webcam or the dedicated Waves Nx Head Tracker Bluetooth device – for enhanced realism of the immersive three-dimensional spatial effect.

FEATURES:

• Headphone monitoring plugin for better mix reference
• Developed with Grammy-winning mix engineer Chris Lord-Alge
• Precision model of Chris Lord-Alge’s private Mix LA control room
• Check your mixes on Chris’s three sets of custom studio monitors
• Nearfield monitors: CLA-10 (custom NS-10 model) + subwoofer
• Farfield monitors: Chris’s custom modified Ocean Way HR1s
• Boombox to check how mixes translate to small-speaker devices
• Better reference for mix depth, panning, reverb, low-end response
• Compatible with all headphone models
• Adjustable studio Ambience control
• Personalized head anatomy calibration
• Supports head tracking for enhanced realism, via webcam or the Nx Head Tracker (included)

Nx Head Tracker Included

The Nx Head Tracker for Headphones is a small Bluetooth device that latches onto your headphones and tracks your head movements in order to augment the immersive 3D audio experience created by Nx technology.

Use the Nx Head Tracker along with the Nx 3D audio apps to experience the music, movies and games you love in 3D audio – on your computer, tablet or mobile device, using any set of headphones.

Use the Nx Head Tracker along with the Nx Virtual Mix Room plugin in order to recreate on headphones the ideal spatial acoustics of a high-end room, improving your headphone mixing and recording experience.

WHY HEAD TRACKING MATTERS

When you hear sounds in the real world, your physical head movements help your brain create a sense of three-dimensional audio depth. When your head moves, your brain remembers where the sound used to be and where it is now, combines this with its knowledge that the head (and not the external source) has moved, and uses this information to locate the external source and construct a three-dimensional “audio scene”.

However, when you listen to sound on headphones, the audio scene constantly shifts with your head, and your experience of three-dimensional auditory space is gone. By tracking your head movements and adjusting the audio to the direction and orientation of your head, the Nx Head Tracker (combined with Nx software) helps reconstruct the realistic three-dimensional audio experience of sounds coming at you from external sources in the real world.

NX HEAD TRACKER, WEBCAM – OR THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS?

There are several ways you can track your head movements to enhance the Nx experience: you can use the Nx Head Tracker device; you can use your computer’s camera; or, if you are using the Nx Virtual Mix Room plugin, you can use both methods simultaneously, enjoying the best of both worlds (we call this option “sensor fusion” – see more details in the table below). Using the Nx Head Tracker has several advantages over using your webcam. Here are some of the main ones:

The Nx Head Tracker is faster and more accurate, providing a much smoother tracking experience than a computer camera.With a webcam, you are limited to using Nx on a stationary device, for example a desktop computer, and you must be facing the camera at all times. With the Nx Head Tracker you can track your head movements while you are moving around, for example using a mobile device.A webcam can track your head movements in ±30 degrees only. The Nx Head Tracker can track them in full 360 degrees.With a webcam, only one user can use Nx software at a time; with the Nx Head Tracker, several users (each with his or her own Nx Head Tracker device) can experience Nx simultaneously on the same audio source.