Building A Backyard Dolby Atmos Mix Studio
Music Producers Guild-nominated immersive mixer Kurt Martinez recently built his own backyard Dolby Atmos mix studio.
It Just Sounds Better.
From Steely Dan to Jack White, from Thundercat to Angine De Pointine,
from Red Garland to Rachmaninoff; press play and it already sounds better.
A Mastering-Grade Desktop Audio Player Built by Working Audio Engineers For The Rest Of Us.
$29 on the Microsoft Store. One-time purchase, yours forever - no subscription.
By purchasing you agree to our EULA and Privacy Policy.
The best sounding media player you've ever heard.
Most media players are basically a spreadsheet for your MP3s - drag a file in, press play, that's the whole feature set.
Welcome to the Reference Player by M Media Audio.
It Just Sounds Better: Your media files, CDs, and even a line input - all together in one beautiful player for Windows.
Underneath it is a mastering-grade 31-band EQ and a mastering-grade VCA compressor and limiter, built to get more from the speakers and headphones you already own.
From Miles Davis to Radiohead, from Aretha Franklin to Daft Punk, from Bach to Kendrick Lamar; press play and it already sounds better.
Now it's yours. It just sounds better.
Real VU Meters. Not a Flat Digital Bar.
RMS-based, warm backlit, and calibrated by someone who reads them for a living. They're the emotional center of Reference Player - large enough to actually watch while you listen, accurate enough to trust.
Get Reference PlayerNo account required. Nothing sent over the network. Your music and your listening habits stay on your machine.
Three Views
Full Player is the complete control surface - VU metering, transport, the compressor/limiter, the 31-band EQ, and your library and queue, all in one window. It's the flagship experience and the one built to look like a real piece of hi-fi equipment sitting on your desktop.
Strip Player carries the same processing chain and the same real controls into a slim window you can dock to the side of a second monitor and leave running all day. Scale it from 75% up to 200% whenever you want more room to work. Mini Player lives quietly near your system tray for the moments you just want to glance at what's playing or skip a track.
Under the Hood
At the center of the chain is VCA-style bus compression, the kind of fast, controlled compression that's helped finished mixes feel more cohesive for decades, tuned here to respond musically instead of just making everything louder. From there the signal passes through a full 31-band (1/3 octave) graphic EQ, far beyond the handful of tone controls in most players, capable of broad shaping or narrow, surgical correction for a specific room, speaker, or pair of headphones. A brickwall limiter keeps peaks in check after the compressor stage.
Real-time spectrum and phase displays run alongside playback with live Peak, RMS, and integrated LUFS metering, so you can see what you're hearing, not just adjust it blind.
Live Theming Engine
Reference Player runs on a live theming engine that changes its colors, artwork, and character in real time. Every theme runs the identical playback engine underneath - the personality changes, the sound does not. Pick the flagship 70s Hi-Fi look, go cool with Metal or Emerald, or go all the way with Bad Kitty or Jeff's own Howdy Player Pink. Import additional theme packs directly from Preferences, no separate installer required.
Library & Sources
Reference Player is a folder-based library - no iTunes-style import, no lock-in. Point it at your music and it watches those folders automatically. Drag and drop playback, tag-based browsing, search, and play count tracking are all built in. Load a physical CD and rip straight to MP3, added to your library automatically. Switch to Line In for live monitoring with the full compressor, limiter, and EQ chain still active on the input.
Nothing sent over the network. Your music and your listening habits stay on your machine, always.
$29 on the Microsoft Store. No subscription, no renewal, yours forever.
Designed and tuned by a working mastering engineer, not a generic software team.
You email us, we answer. No ticket queues, no bots, no knowledge base rabbit holes.
MSIX via Microsoft Store
Windows 10 / 11
MP3, FLAC, AAC, OGG, WAV, AIFF, WMA, OPUS
Output: WASAPI Shared and Exclusive, with 2x/4x/8x oversampling in Exclusive mode
RMS VU with peak hold, gain-reduction, spectrum, phase, and BS.1770 LUFS
One-time purchase, managed by the Microsoft Store
$29 on the Microsoft Store. One-time purchase, yours forever - no subscription.
By purchasing you agree to our EULA and Privacy Policy.
Music Producers Guild-nominated immersive mixer Kurt Martinez recently built his own backyard Dolby Atmos mix studio.
Hrishikesh Hirway is a musician through and through, though that may not be the role that comes to mind when we first think of him. For over ten years, he has created and hosted multiple podcasts,...
With so many functions and abilities in common, I throw RX and SpectraLayers into the ring to find out which is the current spectral editing champion. The post iZotope RX vs Steinberg SpectraLayers:...