Control Room Inserts - What do you use and when?
What are your Control Room insert plugins and why and when? Latency free and or low cpu plugins only? Do you leave them bypassed, or turned off… or on?
What about the cue inserts being sent to musicians?
Take a pic or type out the order of your chain
Only one item, Sonarworks room correction. Always on except when tracking if latency is an issue.
Anything else I’d want to apply globally I’d put on Stereo Out not the Control Room.
I do exactly the same as Raino
I use:
Talk back: Cubase stock limiter set to minus 10 db to avoid unwanted loud noises (in preferences set mute talk back in record mode)
Benchmark DAC (Monitor): Sonarworks
Marantz (Monitor): nothing
REC Room (Cue): nothing
Live Room (Cue): nothing
Vocal Booth (Cue): nothing
I will rather just add verbs for vocalists and amps for bass and guitar directly on the channel and send the mixes to the cue room I need. I rarely record full bands all at the same time so that works perfectly for me. Mostly I need to adjust volume to what room I record if I record more then 1 person.
there is another approach to the cue sends that is smart for bands imo: How to Set up a Headphone or Cue Mix in Cubase | Q&A with Greg Ondo - YouTube
Here’s my chain (monitor outputs):
Klanghelm: VUMT Deluxe - I keep a VU meter on, first in the chain, so if I need to check levels of any track in the mix (including when tracking), I can open the plugin GUI, hit solo, and get an instant VU reading. Makes gain-staging during tracking or pre-mixing a breeze.
Plugin Alliance/ADPTR: MetricAB - I use this to load up reference mixes. I have a few different presets that call up reference tracks I like based on genre (rock, acoustic, electronic). Then all I have to do is level-match the B tracks to my A in order to get an idea as to where my tracks stand compared to those reference mixes. I used to use MagicAB + TB Pro Audio’s ISOL8 in combination to do some of the same things, but MetricAB covers the features of both plugins.
Sonarworks: Reference - Room/speaker tuning is next. It’s where it is on the chain so as not to screw with the levels of my VU meter, and to also make sure that the reference tracks get processed by the same room/monitor correction as my mix.
Cerberus Audio: Ice9 - This will instantly mute the output to your monitors whenever audio passes a threshold. So this goes last in the chain strictly as a monitor/ears safety thing. Prevents my ears from getting blown out by super loud presets, or a loud pop, or crazy feedback loop. Considering Reference already has a safety feature that pulls the volume down, keeping Ice9 last means that if it ever gets triggered, I would’ve really had my ears/speakers blasted without it. I wanted to transition to Nugen Audio’s Sigmod for this task since Ice9 is no longer being supported, but Sigmod adds some slight latency whereas Ice9 does not.
Cerberus Audio: Ice9 - This will instantly mute the output to your monitors whenever audio passes a threshold. So this goes last in the chain strictly as a monitor/ears safety thing.
I use the brickwall limiter on my control room output for basic speaker protection.
I hadn’t come across Ice9, which sounds like a good solution, though I have been unable to find a download link to give it a try. (Everything points to the Cerberus site which is no longer working.) Anybody have a working link for a download ? (or else can send me the .dll 
)
What db setting would you use in ice9?
I keep it at 0db. 1) I don’t mix hot and prefer to keep lots of headroom and 2) Sonarworks Reference is already in “safe mode” and dropping the levels by -5.9db for my particular room/monitoring setup. So if I get a 0dbfs after Reference, that would mean something really bad happened somewhere in the signal chain.
Interesting, I’m going to invest in this SonarWorks I think. Seems a lot of people here are using it. by dropping the levels, do you mean auto-gain reduction, or you simply have the output -5.9? Btw, you might want to make it -6db as that is a perfect bit, and doesn’t require recalculation… but I’m not %100 sure on this… maybe %68 sure.
I’ll throw in the suggestion of YouLean Loudness meter - very great product. Also, AnSpec from Voxengo is free.
I think my new CR setup is going to be this.
1.)Plugin Alliance/ADPTR: MetricAB
2.)Klanghelm: VUMT
3.)Sonnox Pro-Codec
4.)Voxengo AnSPec (free)
5.)Voxengo Span Pro
5.)YouLean 2 Pro
6.)SonarWorks Reference 4
Just Sonarworks for me.
It’s not auto-gain reduction per se. Reference will listen to your room and monitoring environment and create an EQ curve to compensate for any peaks and valleys in the frequency response in your room. It then offers the option of adjusting the gain in an amount equivalent to the largest peak, to make sure you don’t clip anywhere in the chain. So in my case, there reference curve is doing a 5.9db boost somewhere along the way, and the software is saying “ok, so I’m gonna drop everything by -5.9db to make sure I’m not causing clipping anywhere.” It’s optional and can be turned off, but I don’t mind keeping it on. The school of thought being “mix quieter, monitor louder.”
I understand.
I have a quick and dirty EQ with HPF and LPF that simulates tiny speakers for checking mixes. It’s normally off.
I’ve decided I might add a tuner as well. useful to have where all audio is routed, can just solo