COMPANY PROFILE FOCUSRITE
f any single technological advance has changed the way music is made in the past two decades, it has been the growth of home and project recording, and the subsequent decline of the professional recording studio. Once the province of dedicated amateurs, home studios have now become the norm for musicians, with even platinum-selling projects being entirely, or almost entirely, recorded outside the once hallowed ground of the traditional professional recording studio. There are problems with
project studios, though – not least of which is noise leakage. Musicians being musicians, they tend to come out at night and
26 miPRO MARCH 2011
Open the box... I
want to mix their masterpieces when they feel like it. Which is all well and good, unless they happen to be living in an environment where neighbours might object, or where they might reduce other family members to 3am screaming fits. The obvious answer is to mix on headphones – but even the best headphones are no substitute for decent monitor speakers. At least, they haven’t been until now. That acoustic stalemate could be about to change due to the introduction by Focusrite of a very affordable solution that enables home
recordists to emulate traditional speaker performance characteristics on their headphones.
... and take the money – Focusrite’s new headphone system opens up a new market for retailers to cash in on. Gary Cooper dons the cans and has a listen…
The product is the Focusrite VRM box – a standalone implementation of the highly regarded Saffire Pro 24 DSP – and it’s the sort of product that any retailer with customers owning their own studio facilities should be able to turn into a buyer. In fact the product is so hot that it won a Best In Show award at this year’s NAMM. Focusrite’s media co-ordinator, Will Hoult, explains its genesis: “VRM stands for Virtual Reference Monitoring – technology pioneered by Focusrite which essentially emulates the effects of speakers in rooms, so you can mix in a more natural environment over headphones. As most people know, listening via headphones you get a different stereo image, with the left channel being fed only to the left ear and the right channel only to the right ear. This gives a different stereo image, so one of our specialists in the R&D
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