Back in 2019, German-based music gear manufacturer Sennheiser acquired the audioware company from the same country, Dear Reality. Recently, it has announced that as of July 31, 2025 it will no longer be releasing any new products (or updates to existing titles) under the Dear Reality name – officialy putting an end to the Dusseldorf-based plugin development group.
Dear Reality had been developing audio production tools since the company’s establishment in 2014, releasing VST plugins and effects with focus on the spatial side of audio processing in music production – offering products such as dearVR PRO 2, dearVR MIX as well as the EXOVERB spatial reverb in addition to some other popular 3D/binaural mixing utilities such as dearVR MUSIC and dearVR SPATIAL CONNECT.
In the announcement, Sennheiser declared that the majority of commercial products released under the Dear Reality name will now be available for free.
The list of free Dear Reality VST plugins that can now be downloaded contains the following:
- dearVR PRO 2 – spatializer plugin for binaural mixing
- EXOVERB – stereo reverb plugin based on spatial / 3-dimensional Impulse Response samples
- EXOVERB MICRO – the same plugin, with less features
- dearVR AMBI MICRO – 3D / Ambisonics sound field to binaural converter (360-degree audio decoder for headphone mixing)
- dearVR MICRO – binaural based spatial audio plugin (stereo placement VST / spatial positioning room simulator)
- dearVR MIX – mix reference monitoring plugin / room acoustics simulation (master / mix monitor / loudspeaker emulation for headphones)
- dearVR MIX-SE – another mix reference plugin made specifically for the Sennheiser HD 490 PRO headphones
- dearVR SPATIAL CONNECT – provides VR controller support for DAW operations (Virtual Reality integration for 3D audio production)
- MIYA – re-synthesizer (sample resynthesis engine)
- dearVR MUSIC – advanced 3D mixing with Ambisonic format support as well as Binaural
- dearVR UNITY – 3D spatializer plugin that provides acoustic room virtualization for the Unity game engine
To get the Dear Reality plugins for free, you are required to sign up and subscribe to the Sennheiser mailing list.
dearVR plugins are compatible with Windows PC and Mac (macOS) machines. Supported formats are VST/VST2/VST3, Audio Units (AU) and AAX (Avid Audio Extension).
