Control Room | separate inserts for each monitor

Currently, the Control Room applies one set of inserts to all monitors.

However, when using room correction (Sonarworks, IK Multimedia ARC, etc.) or headphone correction (TB Isone, Waves NX, etc.) plugins, each monitor needs its own instance of the plugin. It would be bad, for example, to provide room corrections to headphones; conversely, it would be bad to apply headphone correction to a speaker set.

The current workaround is to manually turn on/off the relevant inserts. However, this is tedious and it’s easy to forget sometimes.

I would like for each monitor to have the option to have its own set of inserts. That way, each set of speakers/headphones can have its own precise settings via plugins.

I’m planning to use room correction (speaker calibration) in the near future and I agree with your concerns. Control room is the place to do it, if the user has Cubase Pro. I’m leaning towards Sonarworks.

One thing however… I wonder if this correction should or could be applied closer to the hardware, say in the audio interface. It’s basically an EQ curve applied on specific hardware channels. If the curve(s) were applied within the audio interface then the load on the DAW would be removed and you wouldn’t have to worry about removing the insert when mixing down, freezing, or changing monitoring devices.

In the case of RME interfaces, we have totalmix, which includes the ability to import EQ files (.tmeq). Doing an export for test purposes, I find that it’s a text file – XML actually. It’s basically a list of control/value pairs. The reference HD version of sonarworks has a txt export, but who wants to pay big bucks for that? Especially since we don’t know that the sonarworks export will really work as a .tmeq. It seems very likely that it would not, because totalmix has a small number of parametric EQs and a low cut filter. There’s no way it could produce the complex correction curves of sonarworks. :frowning:

And while on this subject, let me point out that a similar capability in Wavelab would be extremely valuable (with a dedicated insert chain for the headphones as well). In almost all cases, a single insert would be adequate, but they do need to be there on a per-output basis.

Colin, I have implemented several room correction solutions and I can tell you that, hands-down, Sonarworks is the optimal software in the pack.

You are correct in your assessment; there are few devices available that can operate in the time domain as well as perform spectral correction.Simple EQ solutions don’t cut it; that’s why Sonarworks (and to some extent, ARC) work so well. They focus and center the image using time-based correction. The difference between these and other EQ-only solutions is readily audible.