The Secret For A Perfect Mix: Sienna Headphone Mixing Plugin

The Plugin ‘Sienna’, from Acustica Audio, enables you to mix confidently on headphones with a quality not achievable before

The Plugin developer Acustica Audio, well known for providing the most authentic reproduction of sampled vintage gear and other high-end hardware devices via Plugins, has created a new mixing tool perfect for those who don’t have a perfectly treated room for mixing or they want to have more references in the mixing stage of their tracks: Sienna .

Sienna is a unique combination of Acustica’s exclusive sampling technology and a proprietary algorithm which tunes your headphone frequency response in order perform better while mixing and recreates, on headphones, “an authentic, mixing-in-the-room feel that other plugins don’t achieve.”

To accomplish that, the Acustica Audio team had to check over 180 headphones in their catalog one by one to learn the limits and strengths of each-one and then fine tune them by ear in order to find an individual curve that wouldn’t introduce any artifacts in the sound.

And that’s not the only thing that the plugin offers… Sienna also includes Sienna Rooms which is the only plugin of its kind to accurately emulate speaker harmonics and distortion trough your headphones, and includes in its base pack two accurate models of studios, an anechoic chamber and four sets of high-end monitors among other reference profiles like high-end monitors, Hi-Fi systems, car stereos, TVs, radios, laptop speakers and more.

Sienna also includes Sienna Guru which offers more precise controls for tuning the sound and Sienna Reference Pro, similar to Reference but with more controls.

---

Our test:

In our test we tried Sienna Reference and Sienna Rooms with two different headphones. In one hand the Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO 80 Ohm and in the other the Audio-Técnica ATH-M50X.

With both headphones we felt immediately the difference. The sound space increased, mids and highs were more controlled and we didn’t notice any plasticky or artificial sound over ours.

With Sienna Rooms the possibilities of referencing your sound increase drastically by changing the headphone profile to emulate a controlled room. The sound was natural but we found that it doesn’t substitute completely the experience of an acoustic treated room, but if felt amazing in order to gain references from room-like environments. As a note, we have to say that most of our sound references come from headphones and not from studio monitors, as for most people.

---

Conclusion and price:

We are amazed by the sound quality of the plugin and the variety of headphones compatible with it, as we are with the quantity of references that lets you pick in order to listen to your mix in different environments.

In short, the Sienna Headphone Mixing Plugin from Acustica Audio is an incredible tool capable of increasing the final quality of your mixes that you definitely have to try.

Acustica Audio offers 3 Volumes of the Sienna Plugin and a trial version so you can check the plugin before the purchase :