Slate VSX headphones

TravisG406

TravisG406

Power User
Got mine about a week ago, these are amazing! I can immediately find issues in the low end of my mixes I have in progress. I want to listen to my entire music collection again haha
 
I'd like to try them. I've never had success mixing with headphones other than L/R placement. Every time I try and then listen on my studio monitors, everything sounds like shit. But when I mix on my monitors, it sounds great through headphones as well.
 
I looked at the Slate website, and a couple of things concern me.

First, Slate says (correctly) that room modes screw up your sound. Then he describes the headphones as modeling various speakers in various rooms. I'm assuming that the modeling will include these room modes, as well as include the amplitude response of the various speakers used and the reflective environment of the rooms. Too little information is given.

Second, the software means latency. I can find no spec as to what kind of latency I can expect to deal with. Is it in milliseconds, tens of milliseconds, hundreds? For mixing or listening, no problem. But I want to be able to track with them as well, and perhaps even develop tones.

Cetera has some binaural recordings that blew my mind, so I'm very interested in hearing the Slate cans. The main thing I hate about headphones is that....they sound like headphones. Even accurate ones don't sound like speakers in front of me, but rather give me a claustrophobic feeling of a speaker on my ear.. If I can find somewhere that will accept returns, I might give these a try.
 
steadystate said:
I looked at the Slate website, and a couple of things concern me.

First, Slate says (correctly) that room modes screw up your sound. Then he describes the headphones as modeling various speakers in various rooms. I'm assuming that the modeling will include these room modes, as well as include the amplitude response of the various speakers used and the reflective environment of the rooms. Too little information is given.

Second, the software means latency. I can find no spec as to what kind of latency I can expect to deal with. Is it in milliseconds, tens of milliseconds, hundreds? For mixing or listening, no problem. But I want to be able to track with them as well, and perhaps even develop tones.

Cetera has some binaural recordings that blew my mind, so I'm very interested in hearing the Slate cans. The main thing I hate about headphones is that....they sound like headphones. Even accurate ones don't sound like speakers in front of me, but rather give me a claustrophobic feeling of a speaker on my ear.. If I can find somewhere that will accept returns, I might give these a try.
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The rooms sound great, the bass clarity is incredible, but yeah if you don't want to mess with iLok you're not gonna be happy :) I am just doing the software iLok and had no issues on an 11 year old recording pc I have.
 
steadystate said:
iLok is a crime against humanity. With the VSX, it doesn't even make sense because you need the hardware to properly make use of the software.
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Yeah, he mentioned he is possibly building a version with the dsp onboard, but for now it is what it is :)
 
I guess he's afraid that people will pirate the software and use it with other headphones (resulting in a loss of sales), even though the results won't be as accurate. If they included an iLok dongle, I might try it. But I'm not paying $45 just for a dongle.
 
Can't you just use the iLok license manager to activate it to your computer? I don't recall paying for that application and it works fine :)
 
TravisG406 said:
Can't you just use the iLok license manager to activate it to your computer? I don't recall paying for that application and it works fine :)
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It doesn't work fine on my computers. It constantly disables my paid programs, claiming they're on a different machine. If I try to reactivate the program , the license manager fails to deactivate what it thinks was another computer and won't let me reactivate on what it thinks is the new computer; which is the same fucking computer.. I can't use what I paid for until I call the vendor who made it and get them to straighten it out. Then it happens again, and I have to call the vendor again. Then it happens again, and again, and again. If it happens on Friday evening, I can't use what I paid for until at least the following Monday. I'm sick of it. It's not worth the hassle. I'd sooner do without the software. PACE support is as useless as their license manager. I'm glad you have better luck with it than I did. I hate ilok. Pure hatred. If it were a living entity, I would track it down and kill it with a blowtorch.
 
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I just installed the VSX plugin and you don't need an iLok USB thingy. You do need to install the iLok License Manager on the PC where you want to use the plugin and you get 3 activations. But I'm not a fan of this approach either especially since you already have a piece of hardware. Using the plugin with another headphone gave some really confusing results anyway.

The headphones sound awesome without the plugin, both playing guitar on the AXE FX or simply listening to Spotify. But when you use them directly on the AXE FX you unfortunately can't use the plugins, at least I don't expect that Cliff will support plugins in the box any time soon. Listening to Spotify using the plugin isn't easy (I used Reaper, VoiceMeeter and some experimenting) but lots of fun.

I wouldn't buy the VSX to only use for playing guitar on the Axe FX and/or audio listening. But when you want to do some mixing and especially if you don't have the room, the space or the money for decent monitors (like me), this is a very nice option.
 
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