Focusrite VRM Box review
Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2011 7:33 am
With astroman's recommendation from this thread: http://forums.planetz.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=30325
I quickly ordered the VRM Box as a way to drive my headphones. The virtual monitoring part was interesting, but sort of secondary to just getting enough juice for the cans.
As a headphone amp, the VRM box does the job fine. It's not a particularly hot amp, it's definitely no audiophile amp. But if you just need to monitor on the headphone for quick checks, it's perfectly adequate.
The VRM part takes some getting used to. It's basically just a convolution engine supplied with a bunch of impulses taken from speakers. My first impression was that there's way, way, way too much room ambience. To me, it sounds less a speaker emulation, but more like a small room reverb. If it were a reverb, I'd turn down the wet signal like 10db, way, way down.
There are 3 rooms. Studio, living room, and bed room. Living room and bed room are so acoustically messed up that I wouldn't even use them as a "reality" check. (how would the mix sound on someone's desktop pc?) The studio room is the least reverby, but still sounds very boxy, and it seems to have resonating nodes particularly in the mid bass that make tones linger. Overall it seems to assume that speakers in a room automatically emphasizes 300-800hz zone quite a bit, which a good sign of horrible acoustics.
The different speakers do have different characteristics.. because of the reverb, it's really hard to "hear" the speakers past the room colorizing, but you get the impression that one emphasizes 1k zone while others replicate 60hz zone very well etc. But again, all this is marred with the room colorization.
I also think the signal flow is messed up to begin with, since there's nowhere to set up your headphones. It's sort of unbelievable that focusrite went through the trouble of creating a product around simulating speakers, but didn't take the playback device into account. And obviously the sound of a headphone varies quite a bit from model to model. Theoretically, there should be another convolution step to neutralize the microphone to headphone part of the signal chain.
I do think that using convolution to simulate a speaker in a room situation is a nice concept. It's also very doable, just this implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I also understand that the VRM product is for people who either can't afford proper monitors or don't understand the importance of them.. which generally points at a not so serious crowd, so for that, the price to performance ratio is right.
Oh and by the way, I probably shouldn't be mixing on headphones anyway. lol.
----- addition:
after a day of listening to VRM, I'm beginning to see a few things:
1. Your ears adjust to the strange convolution sound. I guess it's like "learning" a pair of new speakers.. After a while you stop hearing the box and roominess, and start to feel like the sound is coming from the front. Still bit roomy, but definitely looses the phased "bad mono conversion" sort of sound I initially heard. The effect is pronounced at first, but will go away after a couple of hours.
2. After your ears adjust, then switching between speakers serves its purpose. A lot of over emphasis that I thought was coming from the convolution was inconsistencies in the mix that when tweaked, cleaned up the overall mix. I'm still very uncomfortable with this approach, but better than nothing.
Overall, getting over the "learning" phase, the box offers much more value and the signal sounds much less broken.
I quickly ordered the VRM Box as a way to drive my headphones. The virtual monitoring part was interesting, but sort of secondary to just getting enough juice for the cans.
As a headphone amp, the VRM box does the job fine. It's not a particularly hot amp, it's definitely no audiophile amp. But if you just need to monitor on the headphone for quick checks, it's perfectly adequate.
The VRM part takes some getting used to. It's basically just a convolution engine supplied with a bunch of impulses taken from speakers. My first impression was that there's way, way, way too much room ambience. To me, it sounds less a speaker emulation, but more like a small room reverb. If it were a reverb, I'd turn down the wet signal like 10db, way, way down.
There are 3 rooms. Studio, living room, and bed room. Living room and bed room are so acoustically messed up that I wouldn't even use them as a "reality" check. (how would the mix sound on someone's desktop pc?) The studio room is the least reverby, but still sounds very boxy, and it seems to have resonating nodes particularly in the mid bass that make tones linger. Overall it seems to assume that speakers in a room automatically emphasizes 300-800hz zone quite a bit, which a good sign of horrible acoustics.
The different speakers do have different characteristics.. because of the reverb, it's really hard to "hear" the speakers past the room colorizing, but you get the impression that one emphasizes 1k zone while others replicate 60hz zone very well etc. But again, all this is marred with the room colorization.
I also think the signal flow is messed up to begin with, since there's nowhere to set up your headphones. It's sort of unbelievable that focusrite went through the trouble of creating a product around simulating speakers, but didn't take the playback device into account. And obviously the sound of a headphone varies quite a bit from model to model. Theoretically, there should be another convolution step to neutralize the microphone to headphone part of the signal chain.
I do think that using convolution to simulate a speaker in a room situation is a nice concept. It's also very doable, just this implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I also understand that the VRM product is for people who either can't afford proper monitors or don't understand the importance of them.. which generally points at a not so serious crowd, so for that, the price to performance ratio is right.
Oh and by the way, I probably shouldn't be mixing on headphones anyway. lol.
----- addition:
after a day of listening to VRM, I'm beginning to see a few things:
1. Your ears adjust to the strange convolution sound. I guess it's like "learning" a pair of new speakers.. After a while you stop hearing the box and roominess, and start to feel like the sound is coming from the front. Still bit roomy, but definitely looses the phased "bad mono conversion" sort of sound I initially heard. The effect is pronounced at first, but will go away after a couple of hours.
2. After your ears adjust, then switching between speakers serves its purpose. A lot of over emphasis that I thought was coming from the convolution was inconsistencies in the mix that when tweaked, cleaned up the overall mix. I'm still very uncomfortable with this approach, but better than nothing.
Overall, getting over the "learning" phase, the box offers much more value and the signal sounds much less broken.