Grammy-winning producer, engineer and mixer William Wittman has worked with artists including Cyndi Lauper, Joan Osborne, The Outfield, Patty Smyth, Pat Benatar, Graham Parker and The Fixx. According to Mix, he has recently reshaped the monitoring chain in his New York personal mix room around an Audient ORIA Mini.
Wittman had already been using Sonarworks to compensate for the limits of a small, imperfect room, giving him monitoring decisions that translated to Sterling Sound for mastering. His previous method placed Sonarworks on the DAW stereo bus and required him to disable it before bouncing a mix; with ORIA Mini, he loads the calibration profiles onto the unit and lets its dedicated hardware DSP handle the processing instead of the computer CPU. The setup, including a fresh room sweep, took about half an hour.
The practical value is tied to workflow discipline at the end of a mix, where one forgotten plug-in state can become an avoidable problem. While working on projects including expanded reissues by Too Much Joy, ongoing Lauper work and a new album mix for alternative band Wonderlick, Wittman can keep the Sonarworks curve applied to his speakers through ORIA Mini without treating it as another DAW step to manage.