#WAVES NX REVIEWS MOVIE#
#WAVES NX REVIEWS UPGRADE#
#WAVES NX REVIEWS FULL#
#WAVES NX REVIEWS SOFTWARE#

#WAVES NX REVIEWS MOVIE#

And movie theater goes all-in, simulating a massive room with huge speakers. Multimedia stretches the bounds of the room out a bit, adding some reverb and other room bounce effects. Voice has the least room tone added to it, for a very natural and flat sound with no additional reverb. NX includes three virtual room presets: voice, multimedia, and movie theater. It's totally fine, but not nearly as magical/cool as the head tracking version. There's also a non-tracking mode that makes NX operate more or less like other standard virtual surround systems. The webcam tracking is good enough for me that I don't ever see a need for this extra level of precision, but it's out there if you want it. It's a little device you can clip to the top of your headphones, to track their position in 3D space without a webcam. Want to get really crazy? Then you can opt for the $99 bluetooth NX head tracker.

You can even feed in measurements of your head size to make the system more accurate. This setup works best on PC and Mac laptops that have a webcam built in, but you can also use it with a desktop webcam. The webcam tracking is pretty good and depending on the buffer setting you use, the CPU hit is minor. It doesn't just rotate the room around you for lateral movement, it translates the room in every direction, accounting for every possible tilt or vertical movement of your head.

#WAVES NX REVIEWS FULL#

Suddenly, you've gone from having speakers fixed to your head to having 'living' speakers in a virtual 3D room.Д«y default, NX uses data from your webcam to track your head's location in full 3D. It locates your head in 3D space, tracks the little movements that you make, and keeps the virtual speakers fixed in place by translating them around the virtual space to match your head movements. Waves NX fixes this problem with head tracking. It makes you aware that the surround isn't 'real.' Even if you're not consciously aware of it, the fact that the speakers are fixed in place to your head cheapens the effect for the audio processing centers in your brain. This motion problem is the most difficult thing to get around in virtual surround, and it flattens/ruins the effect a little bit. If you turn all the way to the side, the sound keeps coming from the same fixed points on your head. The headphones mimic all the movements our head makes, since they're attached to our head. With traditional headphone listening, and traditional virtual surround algorithms, the channels stay locked in place to our ears. We shift slightly to hear an interesting detail, or to move our attention to a different part of the screen.ДЄnd our brains expect the sound we're hearing to react to this movement. We turn our heads slightly when we're listening to something, often with little movements that we don't really notice. It's a true 3D audio solution that combines accurate virtual speaker placements with full 3D head tracking to sell the illusion to your brain and keep the speakers located correctly in the space around you, even when you move.

#WAVES NX REVIEWS SOFTWARE#

Waves NX started out as a software package for audio professionals that wanted to have a speaker-like mixing experience on a pair of studio headphones, and they've since adapted it into the consumer version I'm reviewing today. In the corner of the 'dimension' tab was a small link to the Waves NX website. My new Dell G5 gaming laptop, a computer that I will eventually get around to reviewing, came with the Waves MaxxAudioPro software, essentially a collection of EQ tools. I had never heard about Waves NX before last week.

#WAVES NX REVIEWS UPGRADE#

Within a day of using the Waves NX software, I had decided to pay the 10 bucks to upgrade the 30 day free trial to the full version.

UPDATE: I've discovered that having this software installed wreaks havoc on Windows 10's audio system, and makes Windows Sonic and Dolby Atmos stop functioning.

Waves nx reviews