The Nx Head Tracker works in low light conditions and when you’re not directly in front of the computer it also responds rather more quickly to head movements than the camera. This can follow the movement of the user’s head, either using the computer’s built-in camera or, better still, the dedicated Waves Nx Head Tracker unit, which clips on top of your headphones using a thick rubber band and communicates with the computer using Bluetooth. That’s where Waves’ Nx head-tracking technology comes in. On headphones, the soundstage follows every movement of our heads not so with speakers, where the change in what we hear as our heads move is key to locating the direction from which the sound is coming. There have been other attempts to reproduce the loudspeaker listening experience on headphones, but many have failed to compensate for head position and movement. This includes simulating the reflective qualities of a well-designed control room and applying binaural processing to create a convincingly real listening experience, to the extent that Nx can present surround mixes in 7.1, 5.1 or 5.0 formats as well as mono and stereo, all using conventional stereo headphones. In an effort to narrow that gap, Waves have developed Nx: a monitoring plug-in that slots into a DAW’s master stereo out insert point with the aim of emulating a control room/loudspeaker environment when listening on conventional headphones. We all know that listening on headphones provides a very different experience from listening on loudspeakers.
Room simulation on headphones usually stops being convincing as soon as you move your head. The Nx Virtual Mix Room plug-in (left) is paired with a stand-alone program that sets up the head-tracking aspect of the product (right).
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