Blue Cat ReHead

[Larry Shelby]

Like Waves Nx... $34 Intro Price
Enjoy studio monitor sound in your headphones with Re-Head, a unique head-response plugin.
Re-Head uses a head response model to recreate the effect of your head and skull on the audio
coming in from your speakers. Together with stereo processing, impulse response treatment, EQ
and more, Re-Head takes care of the most common problems associated with headphone use in
professional work: unnatural sound and ear fatigue.

More information about Re-Head, the head simulation plug-in:
https://www.bluecataudio.com/u/h8iyh

 

Edited May 12, 2020 by cclarry

[ensconced]

It's priced well.

I have all the usual suspects, Sonarworks Reference 3/4, Waves NX (and the Abbey Road Studio 3 thing), Toneboosters Morphit, use Sonarworks mostly. Might as well check this out see how it goes.

[Larry Shelby]

Existing customers get another discount

As a Blue Cat Audio customer, you are eligible for special introductory pricing at €/$24 - that’s 50% off the full price!

 

[tom]

2 hours ago, ensconced said:

It's priced well.

I have all the usual suspects, Sonarworks Reference 3/4, Waves NX (and the Abbey Road Studio 3 thing), Toneboosters Morphit, use Sonarworks mostly. Might as well check this out see how it goes.

Interested to know how they all compare, please report back!

[ensconced]

Very limited selection of Headphones to choose from, this may increase in the future, but as of now, it's limited.

Don't really like the GUI, then I have never been a fan of Blue Cat's, didn't think much of Axiom.

Sound, well it does something.

When I think about it it tends to make my head explode, perhaps I don't understand the purpose of this type of thing. Can you say it sounds good, or it sounds bad? Isn't the point to make things sound somewhat 'Flat' and adjust/correct for where particular sets of headphones may be enhancing frequencies? I mean I don't think it's supposed to make things sound like a high end consumer playback system, but 'flat', so as you can hear more accurately how all the frequencies are interacting together without being enhanced. That being the case, you would think that the applied correction curve for a specific set of headphones would be very similar from one app to the next, but in fact for the apps that I have that show you a display of said correction curve for a specific set of phones, they are far from the same?

I don't think these things should have EQ's and such for you to 'enhance' what the app is doing, that seems to be going against the purpose, as I said, my head explodes.

I think I will continue to rely on Sonarworks Reference 4 , as it seems to translate pretty good (although the more I use it, I am liking Abbey Road Studio 3 more and more), I will also keep double checking with Morphit/Nx/ARS3, but I think I have enough of these things to do what is required. No doubt you can do it without these if you desired, it's just a matter of knowing your set up, and what you setup may enhance or lack, and over time you get a pretty good idea of what is what, I mean there was a time not that long ago these types of aids didn't exist.

So for me it's a pass, but ymmv, and it is a good price if it does it for you.

 

[TheSteven]

Edit: Rewrote this because I realized what I originally wrote was not that helpful or insightful.

An acoustic swiss army knife of head phone(?) tools.
Since it appears to be a pluging VST, VST3, etc I guess there nothing to keep you from using it as an effect.

• You can use this to lend some 'acoustic reality'  (my quotes) to head phones, in other words to give the user the same spacial characteristics that they would from using speakers be it near field monitors (what's described as a mixing room experience in the video) or a guitar amp on the stage.
• Has an overall Brightness control (whose setting don't show on EQ graph - at least on the video)
• You can load eq curves for various headphones - I am assuming the list will grow as BC almost always tweaks their releases.
• You can also load impulse responses of your favorite room, guitar cabinet, etc..

and it can do all this at the same time...

If you don't have decent monitors and can't afford the $200+ price tag for Sonar Works then ReHead at $34 might just be a godsend for you.
For a 1.0 release it's loaded with features that are sure to be tweaked & fine tuned with future updates.

That it can also load impulse responses opens up a number of possibilities

• As a IR handler with EQ & spatial controls
• as a possible studio emulator - ie mixing position responses from famous recording or mastering studios.

Thinking of ReHead as just a virtual head response modeler may be limiting a number of its possible uses.

Edited May 13, 2020 by TheSteven

[ensconced]

Well apparently it's not for headphone correction, comments not in italics are Mr Cat himself.

Quote

SparkySpark wrote: ↑

Tue May 12, 2020 10:34 pm

"Very intriguing and very promising! Blue Cat Audio is known for great tools, so I hope this will be one of them. It seems to be like combining ReferenceWorks/MorphIt and Can Opener."

Well, the primary goal is not headphones correction here but head response correction. The head model is something you do not find in either of these plug-ins if I understand them correctly.

When listening on headphones, there are a couple of differences compared to speakers in a room:
1. Room response (you can add this with reverb or using a room impulse response in Re-Head).
2. Headphones response vs the speakers' response (that's what you can correct with a bit of EQ or an IR in Re-Head).
3. the response of the head that lies between the ears: that's Re-Head's primary function, and I don't think these other plug-ins offer this correction.
4. the crossfeed between ears (that you can manage with the "width" control).

"Like others above, I am thinking about missing headphone models. In the video, there is the 770 and 990, but not the 880 for example. Maybe we in this pro and semi-pro community can somehow make our own models/EQ settings (?) and then share them using the Load... function? That would be an awesome addition, I think, and it would set this product even more apart from ReferenceWorks and MorphIt."

Maybe we can indeed add more models in the future, but we do not have access to all of them

Quote

ilmai wrote: ↑

Wed May 13, 2020 6:11 am

"While I generally love Blue Cat plugins, this is a pass for me. I'm already using CanOpener in a similar role and when comparing against dry sound, CanOpener and listening to speakers, Re-Head feels like it loses a lot of high end or something? And this is with a flat EQ curve (I have Sonarworks Reference in the chain before these). CanOpener also feels like it's making the stereo image more natural and better comparable to speakers. Maybe I was doing something wrong but I don't feel like it's working correctly?"

The plug-ins you mention do not take the head response into account, and it will indeed affect the high end. You might add a bit of brightness if it's too dark for you (head response is different for everyone, so it may require some adjustments).

You may also want to add the headphones correction software AFTER Re-Head, because it may screw up the crossfeed mechanism. And maybe try without it (depending on how the curves were measured, it may have additional corrections that you do not want to use together with Re-Head).

 

Quote

It is for anyone who works with headphones: engineers but also musicians (as a guitar player, this plug-ins saved my life and ears: I can now practice with headphones with a great tone and much less headaches).

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=545419

So I reinstalled it with different thinking in mind, messed around for a few hours, trying things mentioned above, and this and that, uninstalled again, moving on . . .

Edited May 14, 2020 by ensconced