Yes, or try the cheap hard way, different headphones, different type, different style, different frequency response , and your ears will be trained on hard mode. once you get a true flat frequencie response speaker you will be enabled to imagine how a pristine clear sound will be on cheap speakers.

Hey Diego, I am a fan of Sonarworks, but "proper stereo image"? No... Listen to a piano concert with this plugin on and you will know it unfortunately changes other things beside the frequency response..

Me, too, I beg to differ on the 'balanced frequency response' with Waves NX - might be good for other things - but I have not found it's use yet. To me it seems to be kind of a binaural ear candy.

I've chosen CanOpener over Studio 3 for my headphone use (here's one of many reasons why: https://tonal.goodhertz.co/canopener-vs-nx). I'd also recommend using Soundflower for Mac users if you want to have less routing all done within the Mac 😁

I found real mixing work and training sessions to be very different. It is like a basketball game and an exercise machine. I do training here only on headphones, and mixing with speakers.

does this work on windows too? I use sonarworks reference but i would like to use canopener too for normal listening and training in the browser :D

Waves NX (and especially the Abbey Road one) major snakeoil in my opinion, it only adds colour to the sound which you dont want. Go for Goodhertz CanOpener which is a good emulation of a speaker phenomena called Crossfeed.

@Игорь Моисеев I honestly don't agree. Can you elaborate on that?

@Ricardo V. Duke You can make a signal loopback by taking the output of your computer's audio then connect it on an input in your DAW to process it however you want. This can be done with your audio interface or a virtual one

Very useful info, I'll try CanOpener... Thanks to all!

Ok my friends, after your comments I made some tests... There is an well known pink noise spectrum analysis in the first image. In the next two images you'll see the spectrum analysis of pink noise through Waves NX plugin, and then through GoodHerzt CanOpener. Clearly Waves add more color than Goodhertz, you were rigth. BUT!!! Hey, Goodhertz just take a copy of a channel signal, dim the level, aplies a bit of delay and then add that to the other channel... To me, the recration of a real ambience is better done by Waves, offcourse, never as good as real monitors but if you are looking for an emulated stereo image, Waves is the best option. If you are mixing, use it just when you are creating the stereo image of your mix and then remove that when are doing the spectrum balance.

Waves NX

Goodhertz CanOpener

Great post @Diego Polanco !
I'm currently looking for something that get's me a bit out off that unnatural stereo image from my headphones.
Does anyone have experience with Redline monitor ? Heard good stuff about it. I think they work kind of similar to Can Opener

I don't want to start a riot, but it all comes down to this in my opinion : You have to learn to listen to your speakers and room. And you have to learn to listen to your headphones (with or without spatial plugins, although without a center image it is quite hard to get a mix right I think).
Every combination between room and speaker changes your signal, so to state that the NX technology is bad because it changes your signal is weird.
The abbeyroad studio 3 plugin is probably the closest thing to getting a good sounding room with super speakers setup by the best people in the business as many of us will ever get.

Thanks for sharing this @Diego Polanco- I was literally looking this up earlier last week and got the referenceh 4 headphone edition-just using it system wide is helping out immensely. I work with UAD ARROW and would love to get the Studio 3+ NX to try out the setup you've recommended. Can you point out any online resources where there's a walkthrough of this setting this up in a little bit more detail? Thanks again.

@Diego Polanco Goodhertz doesn't explain how they do crossfeed but it's much more intricate than just copying something then dimming and delaying and placing it on the other side (https://manuals.goodhertz.co/3.5.0/canopener-studio/#CrossfeedRealism) The goal of CanOpener was supposedly to "do no harm" while giving the benefits of having speakers (like many other plugins). So the only colouring you'd get are from your cans, which you'd probably like

@Hans Mulders Well, I guess the status quo needs to be challenged in light of better monitoring. Which, from a technical view, Studio 3 doesn't promise much other than to create more problems than it solves

@Daniel Naron, true ! I do use the Abbey Road plugin the way I use different monitor speakers : to see if things translate. And I must say if it sounds good on my headphones (dt880pro -> supported by the plug with a frequencymap, I even have the nx blue tooth tracker) it sounds pretty good on other speakers ! Idon't like wearing headphones for a long period of time though, so I do most mixing on my monitors.

@Hans Mulders I agree. I do like the head tracking though. No one's ever done that before

Taking the theme back to Soundgym. You can play any game on flat headphones except PanMan so I don't see the fuss.

This stuff doesn't make a difference in the first place in regards to training...
The whole point is to detect the CHANGES. You aren't hearing "clearer frequencies" when you use Sonarworks. You're just hearing a different distribution of them as a starting point. The changes that you are actually training your ears to react to would be relatively identical if this curve is applied throughout the whole course of the exercise...
also, I've never used NX but it makes sense that cross-talk and micro-delays would only narrow the stereo image, making it HARDER to do Panman and more confusing to do Delay Control.
@Diego Polanco Is your loopback function doing a round of DA/AD conversion?? I'd look into that if precision monitoring is the goal because it sounds like your subjecting yourself to an immediate compromise of fidelity in order to incorporate these plug-in's for training. I could see an argument to train with NX if you mix through it, but only for the sake of getting used to the artifacts you are introducing. It's not helping you hear "better..." it's technically less accurate as far as raw audio is concerned .

@Guido Nederstigt Never heard of Redline Monitor, but I’m demoing the thing now. It’s incredibly similar to CanOpener. I like that center focus it gives. But I might lean more towards CanOpener because of the features it has like equal loudness curve compensation when dimming. Not to mention that they’re almost equally priced

The first proper "mixing on headphones plugin" has yet to be released unfortunately.

I find the Waves NX suprisingly good. It won't replace my monitors when mixing, but its great as a reference. With good headphones it is close to listen to your mix in another room.