Complete bundle: £379 / $449, audient.com
Audient’s full-size ORIA audio interface and monitor controller marked a turning point for the British company in 2024. The brand is revered for its audio interfaces and analogue mixing consoles, but ORIA marked an increased investment in software control and digital signal processing (DSP). ORIA handles immersive audio and comprehensive monitor control in an intuitive app, plus Sonarworks integration to calibrate the various monitor speakers.
Now we have an ORIA Mini. Mini distills the room EQ and monitor control functions of the original ORIA into a stereo package to use alongside your existing audio interface. Since it runs the room EQ on an internal DSP chip, it solves a lot of frustrations associated with running EQ in the software realm. These include excess latency, crashes, and significant annoyance with room correction plugins that don’t have system-wide audio routing (these need to be put on the mix bus and then bypassed when rendering a stereo mix).
ORIA Mini’s most obvious competitor is IK Multimedia’s ARC Studio, which has a £250 street price for the full hardware/software package. On the room EQ side, this is a similar system to ORIA Mini, with interface main outs routed through the box, and room EQ run in ARC Studio’s DSP using IK’s ARC system. ARC Studio is priced lower, but there’s only a single EQ profile stored on the box, there are no monitor controller functions, inputs are analogue only, and there’s no easy way to add a subwoofer to your system.
ORIA Mini overcomes all these issues and more; it might just be a must-have for your studio.
What connections does ORIA Mini have?
ORIA Mini is a neat desktop box that’s 1U in height and just under a 1/2-rack in width. Powered by its USB-C connector, it won’t add to your sprawling collection of external power supplies.
Analogue inputs and outputs are on balanced jacks – you connect your interface main outs to the inputs and your studio monitors to the outputs. There’s also an S/PDIF digital in, so if your interface has a digital out you can get audio to ORIA Mini without having to use its analogue-to-digital converters; a neater, cleaner signal path. Plugging your interface into the digital input means the analogue inputs are then freed up for something else — an aux input from a laptop headphone output, for example. You can simply switch between inputs in the ORIA Control software. A single subwoofer jack output is also present – more on that later.
The front panel is refreshingly uncluttered, with just four LEDs to indicate profile selection, simple meters to show audio activity/clipping, and a ring-illuminated Profile button, which is used to toggle between profiles but also controls bypass and standby mode with press and hold gestures.
Getting started with ORIA Mini
The complete bundle — on review here — is highly recommended since you get an ORIA Mini, a Sonarworks measurement mic, plus Sonarworks licenses including SoundID Reference for Speakers & Headphones. ORIA Mini doesn’t have a headphone socket (plus Sonarworks Integrations don’t tend to include headphone support in any case), but when you’re away from your studio and plugging straight into your laptop, you can use SoundID Reference to apply corrective EQ to your favourite headphones, making mixes more transferable to other systems. An unexpected bonus.
There are alternative bundles for users who already have a SoundID Reference license, plus a Hardware Only option for those who prefer to calibrate their system using manual measurements.
When working with a pair of monitors and no sub, Sonarworks set-up is pretty much the standard fare; plug the included measurement microphone into a mic input on your interface, turn on phantom power and follow the instructions. The SoundID Reference measurement app emits various test signals through the monitors and gets you to place the microphone at several locations in the room, employing clever, clicky triangulation signals to find the right spot. Once measurement is complete you connect ORIA Mini using USB, open the measurement’s corrective EQ calibration in the SoundID Reference app and export it to ORIA Mini.
In the ORIA Control desktop app the Sonarworks EQ calibration can be saved into a new Profile within the unit’s DSP chip. ORIA Mini cycles between four favourite presets on the hardware, but you can store up to 32 different profiles that can be promoted to the top four at will. Alternatively, per-channel manual EQ is also possible, but this is limited to eight bands.
In addition to room EQ, ORIA Control features prominent level meters, plus a range of handy monitor controls such as main volume, channel solo/mute, dim, mono, polarity flip, plus trim, delay and crossover settings for each channel. iPad remote control of the app is available and is a breeze to set up. There’s an ORIA plugin for Stream Deck too. (If you haven’t yet used a Stream Deck, you’re really missing out..)
Going deeper with ORIA Mini
To add a subwoofer, ORIA Mini takes the incoming stereo input and outputs it to the stereo outs and Sub out using bass management; the sub here isn’t fed by a dedicated output on the audio interface like in surround setups. Bass management essentially high-passes your main monitors at a set crossover frequency so they no longer have to manage ultra-low frequencies, instead leaving those frequencies for the sub. Apart from deeper bass extension there’s also the advantages of reduced chances of distortion and port resonances from the main monitors, plus less bass build-up due to monitors being placed close to walls.
The set-up is a little more involved here. The first step, before running any Sonarworks measurement, is to plug the monitors and sub into ORIA Mini and engage the crossover to high-pass the left/right speakers in ORIA Control. Next, you re-run the Sonarworks measurement process with ORIA Mini inline and the sub turned on. Sonarworks produces a new stereo calibration file which can be exported to ORIA Mini with an identifying name, e.g, ‘Sub on’. You then leave alone the settings on the sub and ensure that the crossover on the main L/R speakers is set to the same frequency as in the measurement process.
There’s loads of flexibility here. You can start by measuring a standard stereo setup without a sub, and then run through the process above to create a Profile with the sub and bass management in the chain (you’ll need to make sure the Sub out is muted on all Profiles that don’t use the subwoofer). Then you have a simple way of switching between a studio/domestic’ listening system and one that approximates the sound of your track played through a club system, all with calibrated EQ and channel trim/delay time.
This is a big deal. Most affordable monitor controllers don’t feature a way of integrating a sub unless it’s permanently placed inline with the main monitors, which means you also need a sub that can handle bass management internally. In this situation there’d be no calibration of level or EQ and you wouldn’t be able to easily switch between listening to your monitors in full range versus high-passed monitors with bass extension and sub enabled. Putting this in context, bass-managed monitor controllers from the likes of Grace are 10x the price of ORIA Mini.
What’s ORIA Mini like to use?
ORIA Mini is a joy to use. I soon wonder how I managed to get things done efficiently before it arrived. I swiftly get accustomed to reaching for the iPad app instead of the volume knob on my audio interface since far more control is easily at hand.
Better still, after setting up a custom Stream Deck layout for my most-used functions, I’m able to work even more efficiently, relishing the convenience of hardware control and not…