Waves Nx

If you wish to have a truly immersive multimedia experience nowadays, 3D sound is a must. The most dedicated gamers or movie lovers sometimes invest a lot of money in quality speakers which they then place in each corner of the room to get the best surround sound. That is certainly a cool setup, but what if you don’t have the budget yet, or if you just don’t want to rearrange your room for the sake of some speakers?

Well, you could always go for a good pair of 3D headphones. Or you could try an application called Waves Nx.

Created by famed developers Waves Audio Ltd, Waves Nx is a lightweight app that allows you to hear 3D sound with any pair of headphones. The concept is hardly a new one; Windows 10 already comes with not one but two similar sound processing tools, namely Windows Sonic and Dolby Atmos. Nevertheless, Waves Nx’s features and functionality make it stand out.

Once installed, the app creates a virtual audio device that will henceforth process all the sounds coming from your PC. As soon as you play anything, you’ll most certainly notice a huge difference between what you hear now and what you used to listen to. It’s hard to put into words, but Waves Nx is a significant improvement to the sound coming from your headphones, and believe this poor (as in not rich) tester when he tells you that you don’t need high-quality headphones to hear that improvement.

Waves Nx comes with just three presets. Multimedia should be used for a wide array of activities, such as gaming and listening to music; it even has the potential to give music producers a new perspective on their tracks. Movie Theater should obviously be used for watching films on a big screen, with the lights out, while Voice should be used for calls and conferences.

But probably the best feature is the program’s ability to track your head movement using a basic camera, and then adjust the sound accordingly. While older webcams may suffer a bit of lag, you should still have a beautiful and immersive audio experience with your standard laptop camera.

You could additionally buy the company’s Nx Head Tracker bluetooth device for headphones if you wanted the absolute best experience using the software. But I wouldn’t have given Waves Nx five stars if it wasn't able to offer a great experience on almost any device.