SonarWorks Reference 4 Studio Edition

[RexRed]

Anyone using this plugin with Cakewalk and your monitor speakers?

What are your experiences? Is it worth the 300 bucks?

Have you noticed if they ever have sales on it?

Thanks in advance for any input on this.

 

[petemus]

I have it since last spring and wouldn't part with it ever. After calibrating my monitors (a pair of small Genelecs with the smallish "porridge pot" sub) I have gotten much better mix results, and I don't even have any treatment in the room whatsoever.

It used to be very hard for me to get the low end even near right (surprise!), but now I can better trust what I hear.  The Studio also comes with headphone calibration (I think)  and my Beyer 880 Pros are much more usable for mixing than before.

The calibration process is quite fun and you can do it easily whenever need be.

Sonarworks releases new versions surprisingly often and has a very responsive support, so you don't have to suffer from bugs for very long.

So, to answer your question, it really was and is worth the money in my opinion. I bought it at full price, but have seen some deals on it as well after purchasing it. Monitor the Coffee House V2.0/Deals subforum here, as you can spot good deals there without having to google so much...

 

[msmcleod]

I use Sonarworks Headphone Edition for headphones, and IK ARC 2 for speakers (which is basically IK Multimedia's equivalent to Sonarworks Studio).

Both have made a huge difference for me.

I can't say whether ARC 2 is any better or worse than Sonarworks, but essentially they're doing the same thing.

If I had to choose again, I'd probably just go for Sonarworks Studio so I was using the one solution for both headphones & speakers, but Sonarworks wasn't around at the time I bought ARC 2.

Is it worth 300 bucks? Definitely.