Mixing On Headphones Made Easier

US Blue Cat's Re-Head aims to offer a mixing room experience when using headphones 13/05/20

Blue Cat Audio has released Re-Head, a new plug-in that they say has been created to make using headphones easier for audio professionals. Here's what they have to say about it...

A Mixing Room Experience When Using Headphones
Listening through headphones gives a distinctly different experience compared to listening through studio monitors. Furthermore, prolonged use of headphones can be fatiguing. These are the problems that Blue Cat Audio has sought to solve with Re-Head.

The Re-Head plug-in is based around a unique 'head response' model that simulates the way the listener's head affects the audio coming from the studio monitors. To create a simulated acoustic space, Re-Head also uses stereo processing to avoid the hard-panned sound associated with listening on headphones, a spectrum analyzer, EQ--and you can even add an impulse response representation of your own mixing room.

Re-Head will create a mixing room experience when using headphones. But it's also useful for musicians while recording distorted guitars and other instruments that tend to sound unnaturally in-your-face in a headphone mix.

Re-Head can not replace studio monitors, but rather make the transition from speakers to headphones and vice versa a less dramatic one.

Main features

"Head response" model: get a more natural tone when working with headphones.

Adjust the position and the angle between the virtual speakers.

Adjust the brightness.

Built-in EQ and spectrum analyzer.

Impulse response (IR) loader to mimic your listening room.

Frequency compensation for a number of popular headphones.

Flip the left and right channels.

Zero latency.

System Requirements
Windows

An SSE2-enabled processor (Pentium 4 or newer).

Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8, or 10.

Any VST / AAX compatible host software (32 or 64 bit)

Mac OS X

Mac

An Intel processor.

Mac OS 10.7 or newer.

Any VST / Audio Unit (32/64-bit) / AAX compatible application