Steven Slate VSX rooms.. which one is your fav?

[DaniZzz79]

I recently bought Steven Slate VSX and I love it.
However, I only bought the essential version and I'm wondering whether I should upgrade it with the Studio Bundle (100$, most of studio emulations except Mike Dean's room and car) or Platinum Bundle (200$, it includes Mike Dean's stuff plus any future room they'll add, however they haven't added anything yet since I bought it a few months ago.)

so what I'd like to know more about is:

1) what are your favourite rooms? what are the ones you love or use very often? I'm really into Steven's room (medium and far) and I read Archon and Zuma are great (as well as Mike Dean's).

2) should I upgrade to Studio Bundle (I don't care much about references), Platinum or wait for black november sales?

thanks in advance to anyone who's gonna help me out

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

There's a Gearspace thread with a lot of discussion, particularly around favorites. Might want to check there and pick up after the last major release.

[Digivolt]

I've settled on Mike Dean's Mains for my system wide

But Zuma, Howie Weinburg, Sonoma and Steven's Mix Room are all great as well

Would wait for Black Friday sale, you should be able to demo the other rooms to decide though

[bmanic]

My main room for the majority of mixing and composing is the Zuma room with Far monitors selected. I then double check everything in Howie Weinberg's mastering room when it's time to start thinking about mixing. The rather strange sounding version 3.0 Client position in Howie's room is by far the best representative of phase coherence for the "golden frequencies", meaning 500Hz up to 5-6kHz. It's especially brutal in showing ringing frequencies around 2-4kHz. If you get the mix to sound even and non-fatiguing in the old 3.0 Client position, it magically works extremely evenly throughout ALL the speakers (and also in the real world).

Another good room for general purpose composing/mixing is the Archon Mid but it's a bit too forgiving in my opinion. You can easily create something there that doesn't exactly translate as intended.. but usually it's close enough that you can easily remedy this in the final polish stage.

Mike Dean's mains is also a brutally honest room that will play great mixes very nicely and play bad mixes with brutal honesty.. they will sound weird and phasey if not everything is aligned properly. The Club and Mike Dean's Car are the best references for checking that bass translates properly (in the real world).

[legendCNCD]

I use Zuma midfields for majority of mixing, then check with fars, howies, archon and the cars&club&deans mains for bass. I'll go around almost all of them quickly just to check if theres something rearing its ugly head. Stevens auratone can be very revealing sometimes, as does the bluetooth boom box.
Zuma midfields really remind me of how Yamaha HS80s sound in our northern studio.

I do less composing using VSX, I like to use some low end in-ears for that first, then move on later to Zuma on VSX.

[TS-12]

I use VSX in bypass 99% of the time, bc every room emulation can’t give me the detail of headphones just being in bypass. Each room smears the sound each in a different way

[billinder33]

I don't use VSX as a primary environment for any final mix decisions, those decisions are all made on my monitors. But for producing or editing with headphones, I like the Zuma farfields... that system seems the most balanced of all the options in VSX.

I also like the Club for checking the punchiness of the low end. If the low-end on a track sounds muddy or lacks punch in the Club, it definitely needs fixed. Even though you can do a similar low-end check with a LPF set at around 250hz, the Club actually does feel pretty realistic in terms of presenting your mix though a sub heavy system in a very large, minimally treated space.