Turn your headphones into speakers with Virtual Studio

Checking your mix on headphones alone is not ideal. I don't know about you but I generally check my mixes on 4 different sources: my studio speakers, my studio reference headphones, my Apple earbuds and the speakers in my car.

Each one of these highlights different aspects of the mix and if I can get it to sound good across all four, chances are it'll sound good on almost anything.

Having a young family I can't always crank up the studio monitors when I want to, especially not at night when the kids are asleep. That means a lot of the time I'm editing, mixing or checking my mixes on headphones.

But what if your headphones could simulate different environments? The clever folk at BeyerDynamic have given us a way to do just that. They've developed a fantastic plug-in called Virtual Studio. Just load it up in your DAW and you can virtually simulate real speaker systems in various environments e.g. recording studio, car, stadium etc. all on your headphones. And best of all it's FREE!

Don't expect it to make your mix sound amazing, that's not the point. The idea here is to get an idea of what your mix will sound like in different listening environments and help you identify areas that may need improvement.

In my opinion Virtual Studio is an excellent tool for checking your mix on headphones, I would never rely solely on my headphones and this plugin, but I'm a huge fan of anything that saves me time in the studio (or time away from the studio in this case) and it definitely saves me a number of trips out to the car.

Virtual Studio is available for both Windows and macOS as a 64bit VST plugin, which is why you'll on my list of 50+ free 64bit VST plugins for Mac and Windows (2020).