The Control Room Feature in Cubase Pro allows you to set up various speaker or headphone outputs for quick switching and listening comparisons. What makes this functionality even more useful is that each output scenario can have its own effects chain independent of each other.
Therefore, you could instantiate a Reference 4 plugin in each chain with the appropriate setting without affecting your bounced track. This is perhaps the easiest solution of all that has been discussed thus far. Cubase has essentially built-in the routing solution via its admittedly awesome Control Room feature.
Oops...! I've been a Cubase user for several years but I didn't know this about using Ref 4 (or other plugins) as inserts in the Control Room. Makes it really easy to use the different monitor/headphone configurations! Thank you for this great advice Matiss, you just made my mixing life a lot easier! :)
Cheers,
Mike Z
This is another great reason for sticking with Cubase and resisting the temptation to switch to another DAW. Frankly, I was always concerned with the Sonarworks plugin sitting in the output channel. I just know I would be very annoyed every time I'd mix down without disabling it. And, knowing me, I'd forget to enable it!! Well, done Steinberg. Well done, Sonarworks.
SAM
This Cubase-specific idea of putting it on the control room monitor bus is so obvious and yet never occurred to me till recently. I came here to check someone had posted it. Silly me. I've been toggling bypass on the Reference plugin on the master bus, every time I export a mixdown, for years, as per the instructions in the plugin. And it makes me sad to think of other users wasting time like this. Sonarworks please add a "Cubase users read this!" note about it somewhere during the install?
Hi James, thanks thanks for the request and apologies for the lag in response/moderation time here!
Definitely, there should be more of this information available upfront. In fact, many DAWs have a Control Room equivalent functionality available too, and for those that don't, you can always mirror this functionality and route a separate monitoring bus manually for the exact same benefit.
And yes, we do actually have some pretty awesome content available on this subject in our Blog and mixing eBooks, for example, this piece by Adam Kegan. Adam and other top engineers have delivered a ton of great content on a variety of topics in our blog - I highly recommend having a closer look, especially for those who haven't checked out our blog yet!