It's not overkill. You are clearly a man of great taste and culture. I'd do the same, but I find today's computers are so good you never really even notice the CPU hit. Even when playing games or doing heavy productivity stuff.

If you're watching a random youtube video, 98% of the time you don't need much - if any - bass frequencies. If you live in an thin walled apartment and watch random youtube videos with your big speakers at night and don't cut your bass and limit your dynamic range, you are a monster.

I also couldn't live without a separate "headphone" mix. Once you get used to something like CanOpener, it is very difficult to go back to not having it available at all times. I used to use the waves standalone rack software (it's rock solid but can only host waves' plugins) to do all this, but since I found CanOpener I've been just using my DAW.

I find Tonelux Tilt is absolutely amazing for controlling the sound "blind" with something like bcf2000. It's a tilting eq, which is very useful in itself, but with a press of a (programmable) button the same slider turns into "loudness" eq that boosts bass and treble (or cuts them). It also has nice sounding 6/12db (programmable) per octave low & high pass filters that go just high and low enough at their extreme.

I also love MV2 for limiting dynamic range.

 

Last edited: Oct 1, 2020