I listened to a lot of songs last night. I have a treated room. One song was different to others: School by Supertramp. When to vocals kick in, well, we are not talking about panning, it was literally inside my head; all other instruments where 2D but the vocal was inside my head. What was happening there?

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I just got an email through from SSL about their new AI based dynamic plugins, link to the EQ here autoEQ and was wondering if anyone had either any experience of these or any thoughts on the use of AI in the mixing process, I am guessing that the plugin learns how you do things and then gives suggestions on how to improve what you currently have, I have had a lot to do with inference based learning in the past and not found the models created to be that effective so I am not sure if this will be any better, anyhow I will install the evaluation's and give them a go.

Post links in this thread about any plugin recommendations, free plugins or plugin discounts.

This club has a nice mix of beginners like me and more experienced people so I think others might benefit from a discussion about my headphone quest. Tell me if you can relate: Context: My current headphones are Beyerdynamic dt 770 pro 80 ohm (not the 250 ohms version, I wasn't too confident my Scarlett 2i2 3rd Gen could drive them), I bought them as an all purpose kind of headphone to start off with: - For tracking (It bleeds the click track a little bit though, so I got cheap in ear monitors for whenever the playback quality isn't very important and only the tempo marking is). - For learning the basics of music production and mixing with the intention of publishing well represented songs (not suuper professional but well balanced music that translates into multiple audio systems). So far I used these closed back headphones for the entire production stage with no Eq correction (they are good enough for recording, tracking and ball parking sound design) and only later - when switching to more of a "mixing" mindset - I place an Eq with a correction curve in the master track I got from github (I am always careful not to render the song with the Correction Eq Curve on): https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/blob/master/results/crinacle/GRAS%2043AG-7%20over-ear/Beyerdynamic%20DT%20770%20Pro%20(80%20Ohm)/README.md (I don't actually use correction software like sonarworks or dsoniq Realphones, I cut costs were I can). The problem is! I have the chronic beginner limitation issue, little frame of reference... I can't really know if these Headphones are serving me well for critical listening or not... I haven't mixed on other headphones yet. Now I am thinking that maybe a pair of open backs might be a significant improvement and might help me even in the learning process, making certain details more apparent, the transient information more obvious which makes compression easier to learn, frequency separation more detailed to help with identifying problematic regions, resonances, with identifying harmonic saturation changes, to perceive stereo image better, etc....