New Waves MaxxAudio Pro – Professional Sound Tools for Professional Workstation Users

Playing guitar, singing in bands, running front of house sound – I’ve been into music and audio technology since I was a teenager.  Plain and simple, I’m an audio guy.  And, for the last 15 years, I’ve experienced the joy (and challenges) of developing audio solutions for Dell.

Let’s face it, notebook computers are not known for their great sound.  Most of the reason for this simply boils down to a lack of space inside the box.  You want big sound? You need big speakers.  But, even big speakers don’t always sound great.  You need to pay close attention to component design and selection, enclosure design, and, in the case of active speaker solutions, utilize some sort of speaker compensation techniques to get the desired sound profile.

As we sought to find the right tools to help us with the challenge of making big sound out of little speakers in professional mobile workstations, we knew we needed a partner with technology depth and expertise in the art of sound reproduction.  We found that partner in Waves Audio! 

For those of you in the professional audio creation, live music, and broadcast worlds, you’re probably very familiar with their wide range of equalizers, compressors, and limiters, award-winning reverbs, noise reduction, and surround sound tools to help create chart topping hits, epic movie scores, and unforgettable performances.  To bring that expertise to mobile workstations, we collaborated with Waves to take professional level “creation” tools to professional level “re-creation” tools.  The result: MaxxAudio Pro audio enhancement software that help get the most sound out our workstations and the audio peripherals that attach to them.

MaxxAudio Pro

First, we sat down together with their R&D team, tuning specialists, and even an award-winning producer to discuss the problems that our audio designs face. Then, we looked into their portfolio to evaluate their existing technology in meeting those needs and defined new features that went beyond.  The result? MaxxAudio Pro delivers bigger bass, brighter highs, clearer voice, and more volume that is custom tuned to each mobile workstation and to Dell peripheral speakers.

Right out of the box, Waves MaxxAudio Pro is tuned to provide a great audio experience across all content types. But, if you like a little more control, simply open the Dell Audio control panel and choose from several content presets (like Music, Movies, Voice, and Gaming). Each preset is even more optimized for the dynamics found in each of the various content types.

Not enough control for you? Make your own preset! You can adjust amounts of MaxxBass, MaxxTreble, MaxxDialog, and MaxxStereo. You can enable or disable MaxxLeveler and, for even more detail control, tweak the 10-band graphic equalizer to further tune to your listening preferences.

Need to keep it quiet and plug in some headphones? Maybe you need some external speakers to reproduce full range bass?  Don’t think those tuning tools just go away. You can use the same MaxxAudio Pro algorithms on any device you plug into the audio jacks to enhance the performance of those devices. 

I’m excited about the new and improved sound on our Dell Precision M4800 and M6800 mobile workstations and our partnership with Waves.  Take a listen to the new sound on Dell Precision and let us know what you think. 

About the Author: Doug Peeler