“I found it difficult to find information on installation for customers with existing installations of Sonarworks before the upgrade. After installation of the Virtual Monitoring component, Sonarworks would not work. I had to uninstall it completely and reinstall from scratch with the new installation file which included the Virtual Monitoring component.
Apart from that the new Virtual Monitoring is a handy new addition. A bit expensive for an add-on with just an extra 3 options: Near Field, Mid Field and Far Field - but useful when on the go. There was no discount for customers upgrading to the feature. It's standard practice for most major plugin companies to offer discount upgrades for existing customers. However, I do understand you have a limited product range and therefore limited revenue streams so I'm happy to pay a bit extra to support as the products are great.”
“The virtual mix add on is amazing. It compliments my ID reference for headphones perfectly. My mixes have improved substantially. Easy to buy and download.”
“they are good as well, i used this for 3 years straight until i saw the need to upgrade. different sounds, but you need to learn the system to not upgrade just to upgrade.”
“The Virtual Monitoring Add-On sounded like a nice-to-have, not a have-to-have, until I need to do a mixing session with headphones one evening when using the monitors was not an option. The custom headphone calibration made a huge difference for both mixing and listening purposes (though not as critical as with the speakers), and I personally find the option for 3 different virtual speaker types to be helpful in mimicking the behavior of a given mix on the 3 differently sized real world systems. I would not use the virtual monitoring as a substitute for real monitors, but I certainly would have no problem using virtual monitoring over uncalibrated headphones. As others have mentioned, there is no substitute for knowing your system and its coloration, and these tools do not replace that, but when you combine the two - ie, knowing your speakers and heaphones as calibrated (uncolored) by the Sonarworks tools, you may find as I did that there is no way you would want to get re-accustomed to the coloration. In a word, I find these tools indispensable.”
