On Intel Macs only (Power PC Macs are not supported). Aug 27, 2012 Another such company is Focusrite, which has also been around for several decades. Most of their catalog is pro gear such as microphone preamps or rack-mount audio interfaces with multiple inputs/outputs and knobs all over the place. One item of theirs did catch my eye though: the VRM Box USB interface (MSRP $149, street price $99). Focusrite VRM Box 4.2 out of 5, based on 10 Reviews Focusrite VRM (Virtual Reference Monitoring) is aimed at users who want to test sounds and mixes on different monitors and in different listening environments. Without the extra expense and legwork.
- Focusrite Vrm Software
- Focusrite Vrm Box Software For Mac Pro
- Focusrite Control Software Download
- Focusrite Vrm Box Software For Mac Free
- Download Focusrite Software And Drivers
- Focusrite Vrm Box Software Download
I am an adequate musician for many tasks, a barely competent recording engineer (that’s probably being generous), and when it comes to producing and mixing, I know just enough to be a significant danger to myself and those who love me. But I love music — I love playing, I love writing, and I love recording music. I love making music, and in this review I’m going to tell you how the VRM Box from Focusrite can help desktop musicians like me make music.
VRM Box
A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of recording a full album in a professional studio with a professional producer, and that experience helped really hammer home the fact that I had a lot to learn about recording, and it’s one of those lessons that I want to talk about today. In a word, that lesson is “speakers.”
Never fear, however, because being Bryan Chaffin, I have plenty more words where that particular bon mot came from.
Listening
Speakers, or monitors to use the proper parlance, are very important when you’re recording, for obvious reasons, but they’re even more important when it comes to mixing your music. You not only need the right monitors, you need more than one set of “the right monitors” to do it properly (I’ll get to why in a moment), and man, oh man, that can be expensive.
In fact, it’s frankly too expensive for all but the rich to even contemplate, let alone do right: If you want to really equip your desktop “recording studio” with the right monitors, you’ll need good reference monitors (you can start with, say, a pair of KRK Rockit 6s, which cost $199.99 each, on sale), something like the Auratone 5C (you can pick one up on Ebay for US$150+/-), and then something to represent high-end home stereo systems, where you can spend as much as you want (hey, the Adam S2.5-A is only $2,300ish per speaker, so get two!).
Seriously, this stuff is expensive even on the low end. But maybe I should take the opportunity to explain why you even need this sort of stuff. I won’t claim to be an expert (see my intro paragraph), but the reality is that anyone who has tried to mix a song or two quickly discovered that the speakers/monitors/headphones that you use to make your mix will always have their own acoustic characteristic(s) — their own flavor, if you will — and that characteristic will influence your mix.
In short, every one but the best trained ear will mix to their monitors (and the best-trained ears are still using multiple monitors to avoid doing so), and that far more often than not, when you mix towards one set of speakers, your mix will not sound right, or even good, on most other speakers. To solve this, you can use different monitors to simulate different (preferably common) listening experiences until you get a mix that works everywhere (more or less).
Dude…check this out
Now, any musician who has ever made a demo recording probably knows about “the car test.” That’s when you take the recording you think sounds great and put it on a CD (or cassette, if you’re all old and stuff (like me)), and then listen to it in your car while you drive around. Doing so inevitably leads to the humbling and frustrating realization that what you were convinced sounded awesome when you were mixing it sounds like crap in your car, especially when you compare it to a commercial recording.
If you’re a desktop musician or producer, you’ve done this over and over again until you got it right, but each attempt involved time in the car — and away from your digital audio workstation (DAW). But heck, that’s just what you had to do.
It turns out that the big boys (and girls) in the pro world use these different sets of speakers I keep talking about to simulate that car experience, as well as a variety of other listening experiences. That Auratone 5C speaker I mentioned is sort of a classic way to find out what a song sounds like through an AM radio or an old TV set. Other speakers like the Yamaha NS-10m (or 10s) might be good for hearing it like you would in a car. That Adam speaker I mentioned will bring a Hi Fidelity home stereo experience to your mixing room.
Pro studios have these speakers set up in their control rooms, along with gear that allows the producer to switch back and forth between them. They’re positioned just right in a room that has been acoustically designed to be as flat as can be, and the whole thing costs a lot of money.
Watching a pro
The producer I worked with in that recording project I mentioned had an amazing ear, and he would casually flip between his big expensive reference monitors, an Auratone 5C, and then something bassy (I don’t remember what it was), and then back to the reference monitors. He knew his speakers, he knew his control room, and he knew what to listen for.
In other words, with experience and these different monitors, he knew that when he heard this through that monitor it meant that he needed to change something in the mix, and the end results was that when the band got a mixdown to download and audition, it was several steps down the mixing chain the very first time we got it.
The speakers & rooms modeled in VRM Box | |
Professional Studio | Japanese White Classic KRK RP6 G2 Auratone 5C US Passive Nearfield British Studio Genelec 1031A KRK VXT8 ADAM S2.5A Rogers LS3/5a Stirling LS3/5a |
Living Room | British 90s Hi-Fi British 80s Hi-Fi Flat-screen Television Genelec 1031A Stirling LS3/5a |
Bedroom Studio | KRK RP6 G2 British 90s Hi-Fi British 80s Hi-Fi Computer Desktop Budget Micro System Flat-screen Television Genelec 1031A KRK VXT8 Stirling LS3/5a |
And finally, the product I’m reviewing
All of that brings me to the VRM Box from Focusrite. This device is the desktop musician/producer’s answer to having several sets of speakers to listen through without actually having the speakers, the gear needed to run those speakers (amps, switches, cables, and enough room to set it all up), or the expense. Focusrite has modeled fifteen sets of speakers — mostly the kind of speakers used in high end recording studios — in three listening environments that allow you to listen to your music in just about every way imaginable, all in a box 2.67” (68mm) on a side that lists for $124.99 (Amazon has it for $99).
The speakers modeled are listed in the table to the left, and the three listening environments are a professional studio, a living room, and a bedroom studio. Each room is different, and the speakers that are included in more than one of those three environments will sound different depending on the environment you’ve picked.
Tip: My advice is to use as many rooms and speakers as you can when you’re working with a tune. Also, your ear will adjust to what it’s hearing, so switching frequently between monitor models will keep your from getting “tired.”
The VRM Box itself is the descendant of Focusrite’s rackmount gear, which is aimed at pro studios, but this device is aimed squarely at us, desktop musicians and producers. You’ll need a set of flat headphones (this is very important — you want studio headphones, not headphones with bass boost, noise cancellation, or any of the other effects aimed at consumers), and you can use it straight through your Mac (or PC, if you float that way), or through an audio interface with S/PDIF-out.
Plug the device into your Mac (it’s USB), plug your headphones into the 1/4” headphone jack, and then use the included controller software from Focusrite to choose your listening environment and speakers. That’s it. With this small box and the software, you now have access to an amazing arsenal of modeled speakers.
Consult the book of armaments!
How does it work? The short answer is, “It depends on how you mean that.” If I feel like flattering myself, I’ll claim pro-am status (again, see my intro paragraph). https://likeclever789.weebly.com/ios-remote-app-for-mac.html. I don’t have familiarity with most of the speakers that are being modeled, and I certainly don’t have an expert ear. I don’t even have access to these speakers to try and A/B them so that I can compare the model to the real deal — and it’s no coincidence that this is what makes this product so valuable to me in the first place.
Listening through modeled Genelec 1031A speakers in a pro studio
(Note that the software shows you precisely where you are sitting in the model) Free mirror image software for mac.
(Note that the software shows you precisely where you are sitting in the model) Free mirror image software for mac.
What I do have, however, is the tiniest amount of common sense and a lot of experience making demos for my former band and for other recording projects over the years. Using the former and drawing on the later, I can tell you that using the VRM Box can shave hours (which really means days) off of your mixing and recording projects and will help you produce a better song.
I should also note that I was also able to A/B mixes I made before I had the VRM Box to mixes of the same songs made using this device, and to say that this resulted in night and day comparisons is understating it.
The key to that opinion is understanding that no matter what kind of speakers you have, you still have to understand what you are hearing, just like that producer I worked with knew his gear. Whether or not Focusrite’s models of the Auratone 5C or Genelec 1031A speakers are exactly right is almost immaterial (for the record, my gut feeling is that they are very close). What is material is whether or not those models can allow you to hear your music in a way that approximates and resembles real-world speakers so that you can get a better mix.
In short, I’ll let studio snobs and other recording experts worry about how exact the models are — as a desktop musician, I am far more worried about my specific results.
My specific results
In my testing of this product, I got that better mix mentioned above. When working with some demos I’ve been recording, I was able to go from speaker to speaker, do my level best to make it sound right, and when I was then ready to take those mixes to my car, home stereo, to my iPhone’s earbuds, and even just out to iTunes through my Audioengine A5s (still my absolute favorite desktop computer speakers), I got results that were far better than I’ve gotten without this device.
VRM Box isn’t going to magically make you a better mixer or producer, but it will make getting the best mix you are capable of producing far easier and faster than you could otherwise even hope to get, and that’s worth far more than the $99 price tag on the device.
Product:VRM Box
Company:Focusrite
List Price: $124.99
Vendor Price: $99
Rating:Focusrite Vrm Software
Pros:https://likeclever789.weebly.com/setup-sharepoint-on-desktop-onedrive-app-mac.html. Speaker and listening room modeling in a small device that brings professional listening to desktop musicians and producers — this is a big deal! Inexpensive. Easy to use and understand software UI
Speaker-modelling Headphone Amp & USB Audio Interface
https://likeclever789.weebly.com/simple-mac-menu-bar-todo-list-app.html. For those of us who find our headphone mixes don't translate well, Focusrite have created a virtual listening environment that replicates the experience of monitoring on speakers.
One of the biggest difficulties for many home‑ and project‑studio musicians is achieving accurate, reliable monitoring, especially at the low-frequency end. However much room treatment you apply, a pair of cheap monitor speakers in a small bedroom is never going to tell you precisely what is going on below 100Hz; and there are numerous musicians for whom even a modest speaker setup isn't possible, whether for lack of space, or money, or tolerant neighbours. Many of us are, therefore, forced to mix largely or entirely on headphones, and hope or pray that these mixes will translate reasonably well to loudspeakers.
With this market in mind, various manufacturers have tried to come up with clever ways of processing a headphone signal to reproduce, at least to some extent, the experience of listening on loudspeakers. Focusrite's take on this concept is called Virtual Reference Monitoring, or VRM, and appeared first in their Saffire Pro 24 DSP audio interface, reviewed by Hugh Robjohns in SOS November 2009. Recognising that VRM will have wider appeal, Focusrite have repackaged it into a stand‑alone box that will integrate into most systems with a spare USB port.
Hip To Be Square
The VRM Box is a small, light, square object with a single large volume control. On one face resides a quarter‑inch headphone socket, while the opposite side houses a USB port and a coaxial S/PDIF input. It will work as a plug‑and‑play, two‑in, two‑out USB interface, but to use VRM, you need to install its control-panel utility from the supplied CD.
For simple headphone mixing, you can use the VRM Box as an ASIO or Core Audio output for your DAW. However, many people will want to use it alongside another interface, and that's not an entirely trivial proposition. Aggregating multiple interfaces on one computer can be a recipe for trouble, especially under Windows, while repeatedly going into your DAW's setup pages to switch between the VRM Box and your existing interface would quickly become very tedious. Focusrite's solution, assuming you have a spare S/PDIF output on your main interface, is to connect that to the VRM Box's S/PDIF in. It will then automatically lock to an incoming S/PDIF signal at any sample rate up to 192kHz — although, since the VRM Box itself will only operate at 44.1 or 48kHz, this is presumably resampled at a lower rate for processing. I had some trouble at first in getting the VRM Box to work correctly under Windows 7, but Focusrite's technical team were responsive, and quickly came up with a new driver that fixed the problem.
I had originally assumed that when connected via S/PDIF, the VRM Box basically became a stand‑alone DSP processor, but not so. It turns out that, unlike the Saffire Pro 24 DSP, the VRM Box's VRM processing is actually handled by the host computer rather than by a DSP. So if you use it in this way, your headphone signal is pumped out of your main interface, then back into the computer, to be processed with VRM, before finally emerging from the VRM Box's headphone output. This seems unnecessarily complicated, ties up an S/PDIF port to no great purpose, and on my PC, seemed to make Pro Tools 9 rather unhappy (I'm not blaming Focusrite for this, as I've noticed before that Pro Tools running under Windows doesn't like having more than one audio device connected). It also means that the signal emerges from the VRM Box noticeably later than it does from your speakers, so you really need to mute or dim the speakers while you listen on phones, to avoid out‑of‑time spill from the speakers.
All in all, I can't help thinking it would be simpler just to offer VRM as a plug‑in that you can run within your DAW. Of course, this opens up the possibility of the user accidentally bouncing mixes with VRM applied, but apart from that, it would simplify things a lot, and would also make it a lot more user‑friendly. Because there are no physical controls at all apart from the volume dial, any change of speaker model or room environment needs to be made within the VRM control panel, so there is no easy way to switch between VRM settings or even turn VRM on and off as you listen to your mix. A physical on/off control for VRM would be very handy.
The emulation of Yamaha's classic NS10m speaker is shown in this screenshot.
Focusrite Vrm Box Software For Mac Pro
The VRM software, understandably, imposes a noticeable load on the host machine, and I found that mixes that would previously play back OK in Cubase were stuttering and falling over when I switched on VRM. It also requires a certain amount of headroom to work properly, and you can switch in a ‑6dB pad to give it some breathing space.
The VRM functions themselves were described at length by Hugh in his review of the Saffire Pro 24 DSP, so I'll only summarise them here, and refer readers to that review for more detail. In essence, you can choose between three virtual monitoring environments — a studio control room, a bedroom and a living room — and various sets of speakers you might typically find in those environments. As far as I can tell, the rooms and the speaker options are the same here as in the Pro 24 DSP, but whereas that interface allows you to monitor in various virtual positions within the room, that's not an option here.
In Action
I almost passed up the chance to review the VRM Box, thinking it would turn out to be a gimmick with little practical value. How wrong I was! Within five minutes of plugging it in, I had become aware of all sorts of things that were wrong with my mixes. Of course, not all headphones sound the same, and VRM won't compensate for the idiosyncrasies of your particular 'phones; for example, I often find it hard to get the level of lead vocals right on my Sony MDR7509s, and VRM didn't particularly improve matters from this point of view. In other respects, though, it was very useful indeed. My own 'studio' is crammed into a corner of a small loft space, and making accurate judgements of bass levels and tones on my loudspeakers has never really been possible, so I've often used headphones to do so. Flicking between studio monitor models was a real eye‑opener in this respect. I began with the Adam S2A speaker model, and the family resemblance to my own Adam A7 speakers was unmistakeable. However, mixes that had sounded fine both on these speakers and on several pairs of headphones translated quite badly to some of the other speaker models. The 'British Studio' model, based on a pair of Quested S8s, I found particularly revealing, with any excess in the low end generating horrible honks and booms, and any hint of mud in a vocal or reverb return sticking out like a sore thumb.
The psychoacoustic 'virtual speaker' effect works surprisingly well, giving you a real feeling of sitting in front of a stereo sound source rather than in the middle of one. I lost count of the number of times I hastily hit Stop, thinking that the entire office could hear whatever it was I was listening to! I'm not sure it makes music more enjoyable to listen to, and it certainly doesn't sound sound anything like as good as a real pair of Questeds or Genelecs in a decent room, but it doesn't need to do so in order to be useful.
Focusrite Control Software Download
For me, the primary value of the VRM Box is to check how well mixes translate, and to that end it is a very valuable tool. For those who are mixing on the road and only need a single headphone output, the hardware element does its job very well. For the rest of us, a plug‑in would be simpler, but despite this, I will certainly be buying a VRM Box. I can't think of any other affordable product that has made more difference to my own mixing.
VRM In Action
For those who want to know more, Focusrite have created a SoundCloud page that contains some interesting demonstrations of Virtual Reference Monitoring. Surf to http://soundcloud.com/focusrite/sets/focusrite-virtual-reference/ for more.
Focusrite Vrm Box Software For Mac Free
Pros
- A very handy tool for checking how well your mixes translate to other systems.
- Provides a reasonably convincing 'speaker‑like' listening experience on headphones.
- A nice option for portable laptop mixing.
Download Focusrite Software And Drivers
Cons
- Integration with other interfaces is clumsy.
- No hardware switching for VRM, and it can't be controlled from within your DAW.
Summary
The VRM Box is a small but surprisingly useful box that will be of real value to anyone who has to mix on headphones.
Focusrite Vrm Box Software Download
information
£79.99 including VAT.Focusrite +44 (0) 1494 462246.
![Focusrite Focusrite](https://medias.audiofanzine.com/images/thumbs3/akai-mpd26-522389.jpg)
Focusrite Novation Inc +1 310 322‑5500.