Waves Audio and Abbey Road Studios Introduce the Abbey Road Studio 3 Plugin, Powered by Waves Nx Technology
— Now, you can produce and mix as if you were inside the Abbey Road Studio 3 Control Room – and hear your music the way the world’s greatest musicians and producers have heard theirs —
The Waves Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin brings the impeccable acoustics of the legendary Abbey Road Studio 3 Control Room to any set of headphones. For the first time ever, thanks to Waves’ Nx technology, the complete acoustic response of Abbey Road Studio 3, a perfect music mixing room, has been captured for immersive use on headphones.
The Studio 3 control room is Abbey Road’s flagship mix room, designed by the world’s greatest acousticians to provide the ultimate music production and mixing environment. This unique control room is home to music’s greatest legends. From modern classics by Radiohead, Amy Winehouse and Kanye West, to contemporary mixes of the Beatles and Pink Floyd, to number-one chart toppers by Frank Ocean, Brockhampton and Florence + the Machine: all were recorded, mixed and perfected at Abbey Road Studio 3.
The Waves Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin brings the perfect acoustics of the Studio 3 control room into your headphones – in glorious three-dimensional sound, powered by Waves’ pioneering Nx technology for immersive 3D audio. This unique plugin, used with any set of headphones, gives you the same stellar audio qualities that make Studio 3 the world’s best studio control room. Now, you can produce and mix as if you were inside Abbey Road Studio 3 – and hear your music the way the world’s greatest musicians and producers heard theirs, with:
- The same supreme clarity of stereo and surround image.
- The same acoustic response that unveils every detail in your sessions.
- The same combination of impeccable room acoustics and state-of-the-art near-field, mid-field and far-field speakers.
- The same well-balanced sustain across the entire frequency spectrum — the hallmark of expertly treated rooms.
- The same accurate low-end sustain — notoriously difficult to achieve on headphones.
With Abbey Road Studio 3 inside your headphones, you can now trust your headphone mixes like never before, and you can produce and mix with greater confidence:
- You have the ultimate reference environment for your headphone mixes.
- You can better predict how your headphone productions will translate to speaker systems of all types.
- You can hear true-to-life spatial depth on your headphones, with the same detail and panoramic sound image you would hear sitting in the sweet spot of Studio 3.
- You can reliably mix the low end on headphones.
In addition, this plugin also delivers full 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound, modeled after the studio’s original surround setup. You can mix professionally for surround – on any set of stereo headphones.
Abbey Road Studio 3 is useful in a wide range of scenarios in which many producers and mixers often find themselves:
- If you’re on the go, you can take Abbey Road Studio 3 with you.
- If you don’t have a perfectly treated mix room – now you do.
- If you do have a great room – now you have the world’s best room for more reliable reference.
- If you collaborate on music with others – now you all have the same acoustic environment to refer to when sending mixes back and forth.
- If you need to start a 5.1 or 7.1 mix workflow in your DAW without having access to a full set of surround speakers, or if you need to create a 5.1 or 7.1 premix before going into a surround sound mix studio for final tweaks – now you can do so on headphones.
Mirek Stiles, Head of Audio Products at Abbey Road says: “Abbey Road has historically been very protective of the acoustic properties of its studios for software emulations, and the Studio 3 control room is no exception. After speaking with Yoni Zlotkin (Waves Product Manager) and the Waves team at length over many months, I began to feel more confident these guys had some groundbreaking theories on how such a sensitive task could be realized. Not everything worked first time and we went back to the drawing board on a few occasions. Our breakthrough moment was when Giles Martin came into the Studio 3 control room with some Universal Music executives and we did a playback. The positive reaction from all in the room was immediate and confirmed our suspicions we had created something special and unique. This plugin was probably the most challenging yet and I’m extremely grateful to the Abbey Road engineers for their feedback and input, and to the talented, resilient and patient team at Waves Audio. I hope this plugin inspires music creators worldwide to realize their visions with more confidence than ever before.”
Mick Olesh, Waves EVP of Sales & Marketing, comments, “The Waves Abbey Road Studio 3 marks a pivotal point in the prolific cooperation between Waves Audio and Abbey Road, which began in 2011. This plugin is not only a technical breakthrough, it faithfully mirrors Waves’ ongoing commitment to serve our user base, by offering them tools that augment and enrich their workflow and especially their creative options. With the Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin, we have managed to overcome a common yet critical missing factor for many engineers, producers and musicians: not only the ability to obtain a professional-sounding work environment, but easy and affordable access to one of the best-sounding rooms in the world.”
With the world’s most famous sound studio, right inside your headphones and in immersive 3D audio, you now have the perfect place to produce and mix – anywhere, anytime. No matter how good or bad your current mixing and music production environment is, having Abbey Road Studio 3 to reference your sessions will take your work to the next level.
- The acoustics of Abbey Road Studio 3 – in immersive 3D audio over any set of headphones
- Precision modeling of Abbey Road Studio 3’s stereo and surround soundstage
- Hear your music the way Pink Floyd, Amy Winehouse, Radiohead, Frank Ocean and Kanye West heard theirs
- Choose from Studio 3’s three sets of stereo speaker setups: near-field, mid-field, far-field
- Mix 5.1 and 7.1 surround reliably on your stereo headphones
- High-precision head tracking for enhanced realism
- Personalized head anatomy calibration
- Headphone EQ calibration for popular headphone models
- SoundGrid-compatible; for SoundGrid-powered performance, you can offload the plugin’s processing to a SoundGrid server
Additional Videos:
- Abbey Road Studio 3 — Introducing the Waves Abbey Road Studio 3 Plugin: https://youtu.be/r7uEcub9QfY
- Producer Giles Martin (The Beatles, Rocketman) on the Waves Abbey Road Studio 3 Plugin: https://youtu.be/ahE9eZRhwgc
- Alan Parsons – First Reaction to the Waves Abbey Road Studio 3 Plugin: https://youtu.be/qaw-lKqXv0E
