For Behringer WING + Waves eMotion LV1
Headlink puts the WING's preamp controls on eMotion LV1's own channel strip — where your hand already is. Turn it in LV1 and the desk follows. Turn it on the desk and LV1 follows. It never carries your audio, so nothing about your sound changes.
The difference
You're mixing in LV1. A vocal comes in hot. Today that's a walk — or a tablet, an unlock, a search. With Headlink it's the knob already in front of you.
Five steps, mid-soundcheck.
One. And the desk follows.
The controls are on the strip itself rather than in a window over LV1, and the mapping is read from the desk rather than entered by hand.
On the rig
Day to day you never open Headlink — you turn the gain where it already is. The window is for the question LV1 cannot answer: which preamp is actually behind this input.
A working session — LV1 behind, Headlink over it. Both showing the same desk, at the same moment.
What it does
The card cannot tell LV1 which preamp feeds which input, so most tools make that your problem. Headlink reads it from the WING directly — and keeps reading it.
The question LV1 cannot answer: which preamp is actually behind this input. Read from the console — the desk’s own name for every input, which leg of a stereo pair owns the head amp, and the range that source actually has. This is the desk in the photograph above, read live: 64 channels patched, 61 of them with a preamp, and every name off the console. Nothing was playing when it was taken, so the meters are at rest.
How it is wired
Both of these are eMotion LV1. LV1 lists the WING card as it always did. The preamp section on the strip is what Headlink adds.
During a show
Here is what Headlink does when things go wrong — because on a show, something always does.
The tray mark goes red and the strip's gain and 48V go inert — they never show a stale number. Your audio is untouched — it never went through Headlink. The SoundGrid card carries the audio and never knew Headlink was there. When the desk comes back, nothing is replayed that was not observed first.
control only · nothing replayed unseen
Headlink checks the LV1 build before it touches anything. On a build it has not been verified against it stays out of the way, and LV1 starts with the stock Waves module exactly as before. You lose WING preamps on the strip — not the show.
verified per build · unknown builds pass through
One click. A copy of the stock Waves module is kept beside Headlink’s under its own name, and put straight back. A failed install puts it back by itself, so LV1 is safe to start either way.
one click · a copy of the original is kept beside it
48V is only ever sent to the channel that asked for it. Linking a stereo pair moves gain to the shared head amp — it never moves phantom, because each XLR has its own switch. Inputs on the 48V lock list cannot be switched on from LV1 at all — a line in the config file for now. Put your ribbons there at load-in.
never redirected · per-input 48V lock
Gain structure
LV1's channel strip has nowhere to put an input meter — there is no metering in the interface a device gets to fill in. So the level you are setting the gain against is the one number you cannot see.
At the input itself, not after the mix. That is the difference between “this channel is loud” and “this preamp is running out of room” — and nothing downstream can undo a clipped converter.
Meter frames arrive about twenty times a second and a window repaints slower than that. A transient short enough to fall between two repaints is exactly the one that clips, so the peak is caught and held.
A flag stays up after the fact, so you can look up at the end of a song and see which inputs were in trouble — instead of needing to have been watching that channel at the moment it happened.
Setup
One small app and no drivers. It finds the desk, installs the module into LV1, and can put everything back exactly as it was.
At a glance
The tray mark carries one job: whether Headlink is actually working right now. Four shapes as well as four colours — either one is enough on its own, so the state survives a glance, a small tray icon and colour-blindness alike.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Console | tested on WING Rack — WING and WING Compact speak the same protocol |
| Host | Waves eMotion LV1 17.3 · 16.5 (Windows 11 tested; 10 untested) |
| Audio path | none — control only; audio stays on the SoundGrid card |
| Connection | WSG card + network to the desk — autodiscovered |
| Controls | Gain, 48V — both directions |
| Channels | 64 |
| Sources | Local XLR and AES50 A measured · B, C, StageConnect reported by the desk, untested |
| On the desk | nothing installed — the desk's own network protocol |
| New LV1 builds | each is verified before Headlink enables itself; on an unknown build LV1 starts with the stock Waves module |
| Uninstall | one click; the stock Waves module is kept beside it |
From the maker
I'm Flavius Emil. I run Orion Technologies from Romania, and I built Headlink because I was tired of walking to my own WING Rack every time a channel needed gain. It runs on my rig today — all 64 channels, both directions.
If you mix on LV1 and a WING, I'd like to hear from you: what your rig looks like, and what would make this useful. I answer everything myself.
Flavius Emil · Orion Technologies, Romania
Coming soon
Headlink is running today on a WING Rack driving eMotion LV1 through a WSG card — all 64 channels, both directions. Pricing and a download will be posted here once it ships.
Behringer WING only, for now.
Questions, or want a look before it ships? — @flaviusemil
Headlink is an independent product, not made by, endorsed by or affiliated with Waves Audio Ltd. or Music Tribe (Behringer). Waves, eMotion LV1 and SoundGrid are trademarks of Waves Audio Ltd.; Behringer and WING are trademarks of Music Tribe.