New from Waves: Abbey Road Studio 3

The sound of the famous control room at your fingertips for $199?

Representatives of the worlds tech press - not just the recording and music technology media, although we were all there too - gathered in Studio 3 at Abbey Road studios in North London late on July 10th to see and hear a most interesting new mixing-related product in action.

For the 79th time today, grown-ups pretend to be Mick Jagger and his 3 mates (shurely shome mistake? - Ed).Photo: Direct Red Media (and all other images here except the software GUI)

Although Studio 2 is rightly renowned worldwide as a recording space, Studio 3 is Abbey Roads all-time favourite when it comes to mixing.

Theres only one place in the world it can be...

Comprising a small live recording space and the renowned control room, Studio 3 has been used over the years by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Amy Winehouse, Kanye West, and Florence and the Machine, to name a few.

Yes, its Abbey Road!

A collaboration between the studios and plug-in manufacturers Waves, the new Abbey Road Studio 3 plug-in is a monitoring tool that accepts audio from your DAW in stereo or 5.1 or 7.1 surround and outputs stereo audio that, so Waves claim, sounds exactly as though youre sitting in the sweet spot in front of the SSL 9000J console in the control room at the legendary Studio 3, derived from 360 impulse-response measurements taken from that very position with an Ambisonic microphone. You have a choice of virtually monitoring through three monitoring systems, which the plug-in simply labels near, mid and far but which are based on measurements taken with the three monitoring systems most commonly used in the Studio 3 control room: respectively, a pair of ATC SCM25 nearfields, B&W 800D speakers in a switchable 5.1 or 7.1 configuration, and Studio 3s famous Quested Q412 system.

Waves new Abbey Road Studio 3 plug-in (compare this to the real studio, pictured later in this item!).

There are some caveats to mention. The most important one is that the plug-in works on headphones only - its based on a refined and updated version of Waves Nx binaural room simulation software (reviewed in SOS in January 2017) and, as with that software, the new plug-in uses psychoacoustics - the science of how the human hearing system perceives and localises sounds - and modelling to place the sounds in a seemingly realistic, immersive three-dimensional space around the listener. However, binaural sound only works if the left and right channels are coupled directly to the listeners ears, as when listening on headphones - so you cant use the plug-in with your favourite studio monitors (or if you do, dont expect the realistic binaural effect that is promised).

Mick Olesh, EVP of Sales & Marketing at Waves, opened the launch in Studio 3s live room.

It should also be understood that Waves have not physically modelled the response of the entire Abbey Road 3 control room from every possible listening point, just the sweet spot - so you cant virtually stroll around the control room or check the mix from the back of the room. However, as with the original version of Waves Nx, if you wear a head tracker and turn your head from side to side while mixing, the audio being output by the Abbey Road Studio 3 plug-in changes to mimic the differences you would hear if you really were monitoring in the control rooms sweet spot in Abbey Road Studio 3 and turning your head from side to side. If you find wearing a head tracker too distracting, the plug-in can track your head movements if you give it access to your computers camera, or you can rotate an on-screen representation of a head from a 360 wheel on the plug-ins GUI instead. The final point to emphasise is that in a professional audio context, Abbey Road Studio 3 is a monitoring aid, not a mixing plug-in - it is designed for users to monitor with and to arrive at mixing choices while listening through it, but is supposed to be turned off or removed from your signal chain before mixdown itself.

Yoni Zlotkin, Waves Product Manager for the new plug-in (left) and Mirek Stiles, Abbey Roads Head of Audio Products (right), introducing the new plug-in.

As with the technology behind the original Nx software, which was first introduced in a pro-audio product but then found its way into consumer technology, the potential value of this technology is immediately obvious in the consumer domain, for listening at the very end of the audio production process, which is presumably why such a cross-section of press were invited to the launch. Indeed, some of the assembled tech press were audibly excited at the thought of being able to dial up the sound of one of the worlds finest professional monitoring environments when simply listening to music on headphones at home or from a phone or iPod when travelling. The pro audience (including several SOS editorial members) were keen to know more about the potential use of the plug-in when mixing in a reference monitoring environment - one of Waves main suggested uses. After all, everybody responds slightly differently to binaural audio (the effectiveness of which is dependent on many factors, including the shape of your outer ears and the size of your head), and one of the aims when mixing in a pro context is to craft a final master that will sound equally good to all listeners, and translate well on many possible playback systems. Another attendee was concerned about the effect of the headphones being used to listen to the output of the plug-in, and clearly, the ability of a 20-dollar set of headphones to recreate the sound of Abbey Roads multi-thousand-pound monitoring system will differ from that of a pair costing 500 dollars.

The view from the very sweet spot in the Studio 3 control room where the measurements for the new plug-in were made.

Waves have obviously thought carefully about pro concerns like th

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