If your studio space doesn't sound right, your music isn't going to sound right. It's one of those frustrating facts of life.
You think your mix absolutely slaps until you take it out of your studio and into the car, pop on some headphones, or listen on a different system. Suddenly, you find that you were mixing according to how your space sounds, not how your tracks sound. To put it bluntly, when you can’t rely on your monitors and room, you’re letting your own music down. You’re letting your audience down. You’re probably even making the baby Jesus cry. Happy now?
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But help is at hand! Audient has collaborated with Sonarworks to create the ORIA Mini, a room correction system designed to remove that ‘how does this really sound?’ anxiety from your head. Whether you’re a music creator, a producer, a studio owner, a content creator, a voice actor, a podcaster – any time you need to prepare audio to go out into the big wide world to fend for itself, you’re gonna need to trust your gear as much as you trust your ears.
Unlike some room correction systems, which involve a plugin on your DAW doing the hard work, the ORIA Mini system uses onboard hardware DSP to work its magic in between your interface and speakers. This means you can get your monitors crackin’ even if your computer isn’t turned on – say, if you wanted to use your studio speakers as FRFR cabs to dial in a digital modeller, or if you want to plug in a keyboard or synth without having to boot up a whole system.
The included microphone means ORIA Mini already knows exactly what the frequency curve of the mic is and can calculate around i,t and help you accurately measure the acoustic imperfections in your music space. It then corrects the imbalance directly onboard the unit via its DSP to make sure you’re not straining your system. Save that valuable RAM for more effects. Hehe.
The hardware unit features 32-bit converters, 127dB dynamic range and support for up to 2.1 speaker systems, so you can integrate your subwoofer within your system. You can load up to four unique calibration profiles onto the hardware and switch between them instantly for faster workflow, or if you have multiple spaces to look after. And with Sonarworks, users can even create profiles to simulate typical playback environments. You can carry out the car test right there in your studio. Or simulate your tracks playing on a tweaker’s phone on the tram.
Audient’s Andrew Allen says, “We understand that whilst room correction has such a positive impact on your ability to achieve great mixes, it is also complicated! It is for that reason that ORIA Mini is designed to be a set and forget box – offering consistent, reliable performance with ultra-low latency, doing its job quietly in the background with zero fuss. No crashes, no CPU strain – just high resolution, consistently accurate monitoring whether you’re mixing in your DAW or simply streaming music via Spotify.”
I fired up the ORIA Mini with my setup, which includes an IK Multimedia AXE I/O interface and PreSonus Eris monitors. My space, to be blunt, isn’t great. I share the room with my wife’s sewing and crafts workshop, and there are a lot of reflective and absorptive surfaces to interrupt the flow. I can never tell what my tracks sound like until I get to experience the thrill of disappointment at the end. Oh well. But ORIA Mini took my space, figured out the weird inconsistencies and bass traps, and just generally made sense of what I couldn’t make sense of myself, within about half an hour.
I’m currently going through a big seven-string guitar phase, doubled with a 5-string bass dialled very precisely and quite loud. That’s a really tricky thing to mix at the best of times, and frankly, I was having a hard time quite nailing it. Using ORIA Mini felt like removing a blanket from my speakers and finally hearing what they are really doing. Ironically, it achieves this by changing the sound presented to the speakers, but it sure does work.
It would be great if this system could work across 5.1 and beyond as well, but that’s really the only thing I can think of that would improve this unit.
If you record a lot or even if you’re just really, really particular with your music, this is going to help you bring it to life in an easy, unobtrusive way.
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