Steven Slate Audio VSX claim in their own words “Perfect mixes, less frustration” amongst other things. They make some bold claims about how good the system is, so we put it to the test.

The Back Story

The adverts for the Steven Slate Audio VSX are so ubiquitous you’d be hard pressed not to have seen at least one of them, and this is where this story starts. I’d seen some of the claims made about them, not all by Steven Slate may I add, and some of them had me raising my eyebrows and biting my tongue. Some people were so excited about them you would have thought that VSX printed money as well as improved the mixing process. I’m an old(er) guy and when you’ve spent 40 years in the industry and the last 15 years seeing a lot of new products you get a little jaded. It’s hard with the constant flurry of claims from all sides, not to get a tad cynical.

One of my Facebook friends, producer Ryan West, posted similar concerns one Saturday evening about the claims. Steven is a friend, so I had thought it wise not to go public about my concerns about VSX. However, fools rush in and all that, so I tried to explain in the discussion on the thread what bothered me. I said I didn’t doubt they were probably a very good solution to an age old problem (more of that in a minute) but some of the adverts were perhaps a little too hyped for my liking. Don’t forget that I’m a Brit and we like to keep things more understated than some of our American cousins. It’s also helpful to remember that us Brits have built a national reputation for our ability to be self deprecating, cynical, and generally miserable. The older one gets the more that sets in. Jonny Ive, the man behind some of Apple’s greatest ever products, once said in an interview that he could never have invented those products had he stayed in the UK, we Brits can always find something wrong with a great idea.. it’s a curse.

Anyway, Steven saw my comments and asked if he could call me to talk about them. I was happy to oblige and a few days later we were talking about house renovations, health, and of course VSX. I told him this word for word. “I love you, I love what you do and I get why you made VSX, but some of the adverts make me cringe, If it’s as good as you say then you don’t need to overstate the case.” Then we batted back and forth a discussion around VSX and the marketing. That was it. It was a good natured conversation amongst two friends. Steven then said he would send me a pair to try. He didn’t ask me to review them.

A few days later a Slate VSX mixing system arrived. I’ve tried them, some people asked me to give my thoughts on Slate VSX, so here goes.

In The Red Corner…

Steven knew that by sending me the system that the Slate VSX was going to be compared to something very special. I own a Kii Three monitoring system. It’s hands down the best investment I’ve ever made in the studio. It’s a £15,000 speaker system. The reason I love the Kii system is because my mixes translate outside of the studio, I can’t recall the last time I was asked to remix something. The reason Steven created VSX was because for a lot of people that’s not the case, their speakers and room don’t tell them the truth. Steven compared it to driving a race car with a dirty windscreen - quite a nice analogy.

However, to put Slate VSX against a £15,000 monitoring system is perhaps a tad unfair, even if some people online have been claiming they’ve sold their speakers now they have VSX. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the claims or the convictions held by those making them. So to be clear, I’m not comparing the Slate VSX with just a pair of headphones (more on that later) but with my speaker system.

Setting Up

The packaging is very nice, a pair of the headphones, a cable, the case and a card telling you to set up the software and use the serial number printed on the box. You even get a gold plated headphone adaptor, which can go for a lot of money on the black market! The set up of the Slate VSX Mixing System is excellent. It’s a well crafted walk through as you set up the software, I can’t imagine this would be a problem even for the most hardened, manual-ignoring user.

Both the packaging and the set up is all very Apple. A lot of companies underestimate the lasting impression left by the first impression when installing and starting up a new product. I was left with the impression that the Slate team really care about people getting this working as it should right out of the box.

Make Some Noise

The Slate VSX mixing system is a plugin that you insert on the final outputs of your mix. Another nice touch is that the plugin auto-bypasses when you bounce a mix, so you’re not sending a mix to client that sounds odd because it’s been through the Slate plugin. You can choose to turn this option off and have it bounce with the plugin still active, although I’m not sure why you would, but it’s nice to have it anyway.

When you open the plugin you are presented with a number of different spaces to try the mix in. Depending on the package you buy you get to try more spaces. There are two versions.

How Does It Sound?

I suppose the million dollar question, or should I say $499 question, is how does it sound? Does VSX live up to the claims?

I’m going to answer that in the context of those assertions and intended purpose for the Slate VSX headphone system. The reason Steven created Slate VSX is that one of the weakest links in the music production chain is the speakers and the room they are sitting in. To mix metophors, a lot of people are mixing blind. A lot of speakers sound great in an anechoic chamber, even some cheap ones, but put them in a room and that’s when things start to go wrong. There’s so many varibles when trying to create an environment for mixing, that it’s hard to know if you are hearing stuff as it should sound. With so many speakers and rooms, it’s a tough nut to crack. I will caveat that by saying it’s not an impossible task, but it can be hard for a lot of people, often trying to hit a moving target.

VSX aims to take all the guesswork out of the mixing process by providing virtualisation of rooms that mean mixes will translate to the outside world. I should actually say spaces not rooms, because the spaces contained in the software include things like the inside of a car and, depending on the package you buy, several well known headphone models too.

So let’s answer the questions.

The reason I love my Kii Three system is because I can trust it to translate from my mix room to the outside world - I have what we could call ‘mix confidence.’

I spent some time comparing a mix on the Kii Three to rooms inside VSX and with some tweaking I could get it close. I’d go further and say that when I then put my regular ‘trusty’ headphones back on, they sounded nothing like either the Kii or the VSX.

So what does that mean? Am I getting a $15K+ monitoring speaker system in a pair of headphones that cost under $500? Of course not. Would I mix on these instead of my Kii system? Again, no. However, that’s not the point. The point for me and for those with trusted monitoring solutions is that if I were on a plane, or sitting anywhere that meant I didn’t have my trusty ‘from my cold dead hand’ monitors, then I could mix with a great degree of confidence, that what I was hearing was pretty accurate.

Even more so, for those not able to buy a top end monitoring solution and/or get a treated space, or not be able to have speakers in their space, this is a godsend. If you need to mix on headphones, or are considering buying a pair of $500 studio monitors for mixing, then Slate VSX deserves serious consideration. For some, it would be a much better investment than some average speakers in an untreated space.

I was asked which spaces I preferred. To be honest I wasn’t that interested in switching between them, I was more bothered about seeing how close I could get VSX to my room. In some ways I think the practise of jumping between different monitors and then adjusting to check translation across them is understandable, but for me it is the audio equivalent of whack-a-mole. You get it sounding great in one space and on the next something isn’t right, then before you know it you’re chasing your tail. However, it was fun to jump around the different spaces to see how a track would sound in a Telsa, or a huge club - the club I did find quite fun to play with. I can imagine that being useful for those who are mixing tracks that need to translate in those environments. I fully understand why the system presents all the different spaces, but my own view is find the one that is right and then stick with it. It’s nice to know there’s a good collection of spaces to make that choice from and for me is preferable to some of the other similar options out there that gives you no choice.

Some of the spaces available in VSX are shown below.

There are of course some other things to consider, some practical and one I’m going to call psychological.

The first practical consideration is that you may not be working alone, you may have collaborators in the room. If this is what you need then the speakers are going to win. If that is the case, then put VSX at the top of your shopping list next.

The second practical consideration is that Slate VSX is a plugin that sits on your mix. So that I could A/B and actually use them in my studio I needed to create a dual mix path. One for the headphones and another unaffected one for my speakers. Then if I switch between the VSX and the monitors I’m not having to flip the bypass switch. I did this in Pro Tools by creating a listen bus, it’s also possible in other DAWs too, but not all. That’s something that’s not a deal breaker, but it’s worth considering.

The third practical consideration is that once you use VSX on your mix then you want to use them all the time. It’s a plugin, so it’s not easy to do this. I created a solution using the brilliant Soundsource from Rogue Ameoba. This means I can add plugins to the audio output of my computer and use VSX on all audio sources. Having spoken to other users of VSX, they also said a number of workarounds were possible. What is needed is VSX systemwide, this would help a great deal. It’s technically possible, as Sonarworks already has it on their room correction solution. I understand that this is in the works.

All In The Mind

My final point, and this is the psychological one, it’s not a criticism but an observation. I had to talk this through with some other people before I could articulate it, but they all understood what I meant.

VSX has been created to give you the sense of mixing audio in certain rooms. It does this in a number of ways. It models and then emulates the frequency characteristics of those spaces, then it does a second thing to counter the issue of binaural listening. It feeds some of the acoustics of the room back into the sound to emulate the sense of being in the space. This works very well. I had heard that in earlier iterations people said this sounded phasey and odd. I didn’t get any sense of this on the system I was using.

However, this is where I hope I don’t lose you. Listening in headphones is not the same as sitting in a room with a pair of speakers. My best way of explaining what I mean is having a brilliant musician play you a violin part from an amazing sample library and then having a violin player stand with a violin and do the same. Assume the talent and the reproduction are the same… they still sound different. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because of the air moving in space, perhaps it’s purely psychological? I wonder if we have considered that listening may be more than something we do with our ears? I know that sounds somewhat odd, but if you’ve ever been at a concert and felt the subs kicking you back, then you’ll know what I mean. Perhaps in a smaller way that’s what is happening in a room with speakers? If you know what I mean and can articulate it better, then please let me know. Answers on a postcard please.

Whatever it is, while VSX is a very good system and one that you can trust to help you make good decisions, you’re not sitting in the room. You might think I’m insane, I could well be, however I think in order to mix in headphones that model spaces and think you are in that space, you have to suspend a certain amount of disbelief.

Now this final point may be redundant given the main target audience, many of whom can’t afford a monitoring system costing thousands or tens of thousands of pounds. They also will probably never get the chance to mix in those spaces. Given those points then VSX is the next best thing and at under $500, a proposition that shouldnt be dismissed. What I will say, is I wish VSX had been around when I was stuck mixing on $500 monitors in my bedroom. I would have sold my bed and bought the system!

Conclusion

So given the considerations outlined above, some which I’ll happily admit may not matter to many, am I impressed with VSX? Hell yes. I can go out of my studio with its wonderful monitoring system and mix with confidence… anywhere, what’s not to love?

At the outset of this review I talked about how grumpy and cynical us Brits can be, it means we may miss out on things that other more open minded people may embrace. If like me, you’ve seen the adverts for VSX and rolled your eyes, then I suggest you reserve judgement and take them for a spin.

They are hands down the best headphones I’ve used for mixing and on that score alone deserve serious consideration. If you are on a budget or working in an acoustically compromised space (there’s a high chance that’s the case) then check out VSX. Even if you have a great and trustworthy studio monitoring system but need a solution for the times when you can’t be there, then despite all the hype, you may still end up impressed. This old cynic is.