FlavourMTC “Mixbus Tone Control” released

FlavourMTC follows classic “passive” equalizer designs where the EQ circuits itself are not able to amplify signals but a dedicated amplifier stage takes care of it. Those EQ designs are well known for allowing very transparent frequency changes while their amplifier designs do add some icing on the cake quite often.

mixbus tone control – closest to analog

FlavourMTC implements this by utilizing 1^st order shelving filter designs avoiding unwanted resonances and takes advantage of “zero delay” implementations for most accurate higher order filtering and w/o introducing curve warping near Nyquist frequency. The output amplifier stage of the plugin can be calibrated according specific mixing levels, provides a distinct “box tone” and glues everything together. Parts of the plugin are oversampled internally for maximum transparency and sound quality.

Available for Windows VST in 32 and 64bit as freeware. Download your copy here.

announcing the “Slick” audio plug-in series

About history

In recent history, I’ve constantly extended and improved my Stateful Saturation approach and within ThrillseekerVBL I’ve managed to introduce authentic analog style sounding distortion right into VST land, which is what I’ve always had in my mind and dreamed of. And there’s so much and overwhelming feedback on that – thank you sooo much!

Best of both worlds

Since quite a while, I’ve dreamed about a brand new series of plug-ins which will combine the strength of both worlds: analog modeling on the one side but pure digital techniques on the other – incorporating techniques such as look-ahead, FIR filtering or even stuff that comes from the digital image processing domain, such as HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing.

First encounter: SlickHDR

High Dynamic Range (HDR) processing is something pretty much new in the audio domain. While there are lots of theories and implementations available about HDR imaging, this is quite new and sparingly adopted in the audio domain. SlickHDR is going to be a very first approach in applying high dynamic range processing to audio within a VST compatible plug-in.

working ITB at higher sampling rates

Recently, I’ve moved from 44.1kHz up to 96kHz sampling rate for my current production. I would have loved to do this step earlier but it wasn’t possible with the older DAW generation in my case. With the newer stuff I was easily able to run a 44.1kHz based production with tons of headroom (resource wise – talking about CPU plus memory and disk space) and so I switched to 96kHz SR and still there is some room left.

I know there is a lot of confusion and misinformation floating around about this topic and so this small article is about to give some theoretical insights from a developer perspective as well as some hands-on tips for all those who are considering at what SR actually to work at. The title already suggests working ITB (In The Box) and I’ll exclude SR topics related to recording, AD/DA converters or other external digital devices.

so, whats on the horizon?

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After a rather frosty start into 2010 everything is slowly warming up here again and of course all the audio plug-in connoisseurs out there – aka gearslutz aka you – deserves some more answers on the stuff that really matters: Where are the updates, whats next and more important when and obligatory: why no [add your favourite vintage brand here] emulation?

compressor gain control principles

A short compendium on digital audio compression techniques.

Basic compressor configurations

Compression vs. limiting

Technically speaking the same principles are used in audio signal limiting and compression processors but just the transfer curves and envelope follower settings are different. Ultra fast attack rates and high ratio amounts are used for limiting purposes which causes just very few peaks to pass on a certain threshold.

In digital implementations limiting processors can be more strict due to look-ahead and clever gain prediction functions which guarantees that no peak information passes the threshold. That is called brickwall limiting then.