Bringing mojo back – Thrillseeker XTC is a contemporary exciter build around a true parallel analog style equalizer design. Thrillseeker XTC is all about adding weight, vibe and attitude back to the sound. It delivers all the character of an analog signal path and provides what digital processing usually is hard pushed to, including a rich low-end experience and that vibrant ‘expensive’ top-end.
At a glance:
- A unique take on a parallel analog equalizer design which includes full control about sonic color and mojo.
- Transient based processing to revive energy and vibe.
- Made for musicians and engineers to pleasingly enhance audio during the mixing or mastering stage.
Specification:
- Three parallel coupled equalizers containing three stateful saturators.
- Each based on a sophisticated non-linear and frequency dependent algorithm with memory.
- Pre-selected frequency ranges.
- LOW band: 70-450Hz
- MID band: 0.8-5kHz
- AIR band: 3.2-18kHz
- Two flavors included with different internal gain-staging.
- Black version to mix at rather conservative levels around -18dB RMS.
- Blue version to mix towards hotter target levels.
- Additional analog signal path idiosyncrasies modelled.
- Classic VU style metering as well as loudness unit measurements based on ITU-R BS.1770.
- Mix control for dry/wet mixing and output level control.
- Win32 / VST compatible plug-in with SSE2 assembler optimized signal path.
- Tested and known to work in many VST hosts as well as running jbridge wrapped in 64bit hosts.
Thrillseeker XTC is released within the KVR Developer Challenge 2012 and from Nov 6th to Dec 5th you can download the bits over there at KVR for free and vote for it!
Variety Of Sound 
Awesome :)! You got my vote, sounds amazing.
wicked
Looking forward to try this one out!
this thing rocks, you’ve got my vote, brilliant !!!
WOW!
Oh My God!!!!! LE………. GENDARY!!!
up to now I had never found an exciter-type effect I really liked on acoustic material, they all sounded somewhat fake.
This is history, Thrillseeker XTC works completely transparent, without being identifiable as an obvious effect. Incredible …
Especially useful: the mix knob – Thrillseeker XTC being a parallel design, you can simply “overdo” the settings for quick zeroing in on the wanted settings, and then dial back the mix control until you’re back in safe, tasteful territory – Photoshop anyone ?
Almost too obvious – big thumbs-up for Patrick’s beautiful and extremely ergonomic UI !
Big thanks to both of you – Thrillseeker XTC is another worthy addition to your portfolio!
the more and more i play with this man….. this then rescue, thrillseeker la on drums is the shizzle
Ohh!!!!!!!! i just download it…. i will try it tonight !! i’m very excited, i’m already know i can ONLY sound great…. thanks infinitely as always
WOW……. how can this thing sound so sweet ??? i’m AMAZED… You can only win the KVR with something like this… you are on a whole new level since ThrillseekerLA, DensityMKIII and XTC… CONGRATULATIONS, i’m gonna write a review on my small and unknown blog, because i have to support your effort, anyway i can.
First impression: Absolutely fantastic!! Tried it on a few recent mixes, The “Air” band really makes it sound “expensive”. Low end? Round and waaaarm!! Another brilliant VoS plugIn. Thank you very much, you’ve got my vote!!!
Haven’t tried it yet but it’s doing it’s job. I’m already excited. Looking forward to adding this to my signal chain. Thanks for all your hard work.
Heihei, this plugin itself is very impressive, very transparent and do magic on lo/mid/hi freqs for real! I`ve tried this XTC on several of my tracks/projects and mentioned a nasty bug. I load up the plugin, let`s say to a master channel, choose Hot Master preset and after a while (may be around 30 sec or so) i`m getting a damn hell peak on the right channel. So the left channel stays playing with pops and clicks and right is just overloaded/peaked and muted. Please see the provided screenshot.
My specs:
Win7 x64
core i3 cpu
8gb ram
daw renoise 2.8.0 (plug-in sandboxing off) running at 88.2 khz (Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 ASIO)
UPDATE1
Also its happens by just inserting the plugin into master track and most of times when i`m dialling the MOJO and DRIVE knobs.
UPDATE2
After 2 mins of pops and clicks its now just silence on master, no sound at all.
I bypassing the plugin and sound appears again.
UPDATE3
I forgot to mention that daw (Renoise) is running in 32bit mode, so no plugins are bridged or something.
Wonderful
5 points from me, of course
Very impressive exciter, for the moment, the only function that didn’t find a use in my testing is the “MOJO” knob. It’s said in the PDF, that it should be used moderately, but to be familiar with what it does i tested it at full potential. For example on the song “All Blues” from Kind Of Blue, the MOJO knob seems to make a “wobbling” effect on the right cymbal, making it oscillate and sound instable. I believe the MOJO knob is for some very particular type of material, but i didn’t find yet the kind of material it usefull on. Anyway, this ThrillseekerXTC is one of the best tool available to enhance anything!! Thank you again very much
erratum : “ride cymbal” not “right cymbal”….
I think you’re right on the mojo knob. On full mixes (especially but not only) it seems to make wobbling-like effects, even at moderate settings. Someone here on the blog supposed mojo is a kind of a pitch-modulation knob (ala tape machine). To me it sounds more like an amplitude modulation on high frequencies..uhmmm…don’t like it a lot…i hear more damages than benefits using it
However i like the eq curves choice and the gentle saturation alghorithm a lot.
Thank you for the gift! 🙂
Awesome as expected! My only pet peeve is I would’ve preferred a -18 select knob/button like on ThrillseekerLA. Having two of them is a bit confusing. It takes a lot of time to think “which one is the -18 and which one is the 0 dBfs again?” Plus it makes the already long list of plugin even longer.
I hope you win with this thing. It’s perfect to add these final “expensive touch”. Way to go!
Sounds excellent! Would love to hear more about exactly what it is doing. The mojo when turned up does modulate the pitch of the audio slightly… tape emulation in an EQ?!
in an Exciter, yes 😉
Fantastic job with one, just great!!! I think I broke the KVR voting system trying to give it a 10 ;-)!
OK, tried it in a couple of professional mixes now bootsie, both electronic, and acoustic.
Exciter Section (Lo Mid Air) Section is stunning on all material, can’t praise you enough for that. Drive is also quite natural on majority of material, it didn’t make harsh vocalists harsher, and does musical things transient material too.
Criticisms; if would be nicer to have the internal headroom on a switch as suggested above, but I understand if you did this for cpu reasons.
Also I couldn’t really find a use for ‘MOJO’. it does add some useful shift on stereo material but the high end loss (presumably from the phase distortion) seemed counter intuitive vs the exciter, and at anything above 1 or 2 i found it to be too grainy sounding in a very unnatural, un-analogue, in a ‘is this a bug’ kind of way.
commend patrick as ever on the gui, and the vu intergration times are also welcome.
Great job overall hope this helps
Oh also I do have to say a general thankyou for producing genuinely useful documentation with all of your plugs. so many don’t.
🙂
at which samplerate do you run the plug-in?
They were both 44.1 sessions. Is there any internal conversion in this one?
Why would it make any difference to CPU use? You just change the values for gain staging?
It might be the case in synth maker that with all the non linearities involved it’s not possible to simply do a gain stage switch that’s all I was thinking.
See what Herb says…
I smashed this thing on a drum buss and with all the extreme EQing and Mojoing, it sounds simply fantastic.. This is such a great tool for a mix engineer..
Thank you so much for the incredible quality products that you make and give away…. every plug that u make are ‘critical’ plugins in a production chain.. how do you do it? is any one guiding you? or are you as an audio engineer doing what you want? (if you choose not to answer is ok, i understand, this is a public forum)
Anyway, Thank you so much, Best regards.
I’m just creating what I do need on my own during mixing/mastering …
You have golden ears mate. Thank you very much for all the great work.
Major plugin debut!!! I’ve used it on all kinds of tracks and also on the master channel… Awesome on so many things. I’ve even used it on classical instruments and they shine. You have to remember that you should only use the mojo when you want mojo… and a little goes a long way too. You can use it clean if you want clean too! Read the manual folks! Learn it… tweak it !
Thrillseeker XTC is destined to become a major success with many audio engineers.
Thank you Variety of Sound, you continue to be my “go to” tools when mixing in the box.
Major Kudos and congrats on yet another winner!
This is outstanding . It is similar to terry west after vst plugin , but better . All your plugins are top quality . Thank you
Just tried it on a snare track which didn’t want to come close enough with my regular EQs. This plugin did the trick with some high boost and mid presence. Awesome job, many thanks for it!
man, your plugins might cost thousands. but they are free. Thank you SO MUCH!!!
also may I add up that they are also VERY cpu-efficient!
Varity of Sound: Making digital recording much less sterile, one plugin at a time.
First of all I thought: Hm…well…a little bit boring this plugin. It does nothing special.
But than I put it on a Moogish bass and the XTC gave it a great polish with perfect presence and a nice round tone. Great stuff!
hey, great stuff. thanks for it, but one channel is always louder than second (somebody already have mentioned it). Why? 🙂
I´m blown away…!!!
How?….
Is adds life to the mix, those tracks I worried about in the beginning are now shining to me 😀
Thank you!!!
This plugin is godly. its definitely my favourite free vst effect plugin ever. I decided to re-master an old track of mine and when i played it i realised how muffled it was, but when i put thrillseekerXTC blue on the master chain and tweaked the hi mid and low sections the track sounded BEAUTIFULLY clear! I would definitely recommend this plugin to anyone and everyone.
I have the Waves bundle, plus Nomad Factory and others….but the Thrilseeker XTC gives a world-class effect. It should cost a bundle, because it really delivers!
Yes quiet amazing plugin that can completely transform whole mix.
I’m still not sure what actually the Mojo knob does. I’ve spend some time trying to figure it out but nothing. It seems to have some effect on stereo image maybe done with phasing, when it’s on full the output signal drops by about 2db, but at the same time I can’t really hear the volume drop.
It’s almost like it’s some very slight cinematic spectrum effect to my ears.
Yes, its exactly like that – some phase and frequency trickery.