Anyone have a binauralizer plugin they like for monitoring surround?

Nuendo
1

I don’t have surround speakers anymore, and probably won’t be able to any time soon, if ever, so I’ve been using headphones these days and thus playing around with good tools for binauralizing surround sound. Currently my two favorites are:

– dearVR Monitor. Does quite a good job sound quality wise and tucks nicely in the control room to do its job. Easy to turn on and off for comparisons, or if I’m doing stereo and switch to speakers. Support height channels as well. However it doesn’t have any head tracking features, unless you want to wear a VR headset which I most certainly don’t and I find that headtracking is what really pushes things over the top to be convincing.

–Redscape. Sounds good and does headtracking, however it is a separate program which is nice for video games, but not as desirable for pro audio. Also means I have to switch ASIO devices any time I want to bypass it for any reason (like speaker use). Doesn’t support height channels either, though I don’t make use of that at the moment.

Anyone have another I ought to give a look at? Obviously I’m interested in headtracking, but I’d try one without if you think it is worth a look.

2

Waves NX 5.1 is an option if you don’t go above 5.1
and it support headtracking using a clip on your headphone or camera based head tracking ( requiring a webcam )

3

An easy way is to assign your 7.1.4 mix to a 3rd Order Ambisonics Bus and assign that to the Stereo Master. Works great.

1 Like
4

@Soushi I do actually own that one as part of some bundle I have, I was very unimpressed with it when I last tried it, maybe I’ll give it another look.

@Wheels I’ll have to try that, though I think ambisonics have issues in Nuendo 12 at the moment. Not sure how the sound quality will be given that 3rd order still distorts the soundfield a lot (despite being 16 channels) mathematically speaking. Also while in theory Nuendo supports headtracking, I’ve never been able to get any info from them as to in what format is expects the OSC messages.

5

Michael Wagner has a great YouTube channel about a lot of this stuff.

1 Like
6

Please check out APL VIRTUOSO, a new binaural translator plugin/app

  • 53 loudspeaker configurations from mono to 26 channels, including all popular immersive audio formats.
  • Seven presets of scientifically tuned virtual rooms.
  • Customisable acoustic parameters.
  • Head tracking (OSC and manual).
  • Routing matrix with solo, mute and level controls.
  • Downmix options.
  • HRTF options.
  • Headphone compensation EQ (65 models).
  • Loudspeaker on-axis response modelling EQ (11 models).
7

This sounds nice. Are there any Head Tracking devices that are known to work well with this?

8

Ya the Supperware Headtracker works well with it. At the moment you have to use the bridge software that converts from MIDI to OSC, but it has a profile built in for it. Hopefully in the future they’ll add direct MIDI support for it.