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Grammy-winning producer, engineer and mixer William Wittman has a back catalogue that speaks for itself. From his legendary work with Joan Osborne, The Outfield and The Fixx to his role engineering and/or producing Cyndi Lauper’s albums since the start of her career – including the She’s So Unusual album (Girls Just Want To Have Fun, Time After Time) – the New York-based maestro knows exactly how to capture sonic magic.
When you spend your life moving between massive global concert tours and the studio, you quickly realise the importance of a monitoring environment you can trust. Wittman has long relied on room calibration to keep his workflow accurate, but his latest addition, the Audient ORIA Mini, has taken that reliability to a whole new level by completely disappearing into the background.
Streamlining the Creative Flow
For years, Wittman relied on Sonarworks software to balance out his New York mixing space. He explains, “I was already happy with how much easier Sonarworks made working in my little home mixing room,” he explains. “My room isn’t ‘perfect’, but with the aid of Sonarworks on my monitors, it translates well to Sterling Sound, who does my mastering, and I can trust working in here.”
However, running calibration software directly inside a DAW always introduced a minor workflow hurdle. It required a strict routine of adding the plugin to the stereo bus and remembering to switch it off before rendering the final track.
“But although I’d developed the habit of putting Sonarworks on my stereo bus and then inactivating it when I go to bounce mixes, that’s still a bit of an additional step to remember and one more potential mistake at the end of mixing. It’s not a huge problem, but it’s a minor annoyance. In mixing, I really want my head in the creative process as much as possible, so naturally anything that offers one less thing to think about, or potentially forget, is a plus.”
Out of the DAW, Into the Hardware
The solution came when he moved the processing away from his computer’s CPU and onto the dedicated hardware DSP of the ORIA Mini. By loading his calibration profiles directly onto the unit, Wittman removed the master-bus hassle entirely.
Getting the new hardware running in his studio proved to be completely frictionless. “The ORIA Mini was incredibly easy to set up and integrate into my system and between the software and the video walk through I was up and running in about a half hour, including re-sweeping my room. It really couldn’t have been much easier,” says Wittman.
In fact, the hardware-based correction is so seamless that it took a moment to get used to the lack of visual clutter in his session files.
“The process is so transparent that at first I found myself checking, bypassing and re-installing Sonarworks via the ORIA Mini, just to reassure myself it was on! It’s frankly a pleasure to just have my Sonarworks curve applied to my speakers via the ORIA Mini without my having to even think about it. It’s just there.”
Focus on the Music – William Wittman
With the technical management handled externally, Wittman can focus entirely on the artistry of his projects, which recently included mixing a new album for alternative band Wonderlick alongside his ongoing work with Cyndi Lauper and the Too Much Joy re-imagining project.
“That ability to just make decisions in my room without thinking about it just allows me to relax and focus on the creative aspects of making records in here,” Wittman says. “I recently completed mixing a new album for alternative band Wonderlick here and the best thing I can say about having the ORIA Mini running Sonarworks in the background is that I can just work and forget it’s even there!”
Ultimately, the finest studio gear is the kind that refuses to compete for your attention. By taking room correction out of the DAW and onto dedicated hardware, the ORIA Mini lets top-tier professionals like William Wittman do exactly what they do best: focus entirely on the music.