ThrillseekerLA – released today

introducing ThrillseekerLA

ThrillseekerLA – digital stereo leveling amplifier with truly analog qualities.

At a glance

• Sophisticated and deep gain riding full of musical character and attitude but with virtually no inter-modulation (IM) distortion artifacts
• Feedback compression design w/o any samplerate based delay in the loop
• Classic input level driven two knob design with additional manual attack and release time interventions
• Highly program dependent envelope timing adoption offering attack times ranging from “instantaneously” up to around 100ms and release times from 30ms up to several seconds
• Mix level switch to adopt the plug-ins internal gain staging to mixing levels at around -18dBFS
• Custom SC filter option to attenuate the SC bass response while slightly boosting the HF spectrum
• Additional one pole (6dB per octave) SC low-cut filter adjustable from 20 to 500Hz
• External sidechain support
• Switchable Input/GR/Output metering display
• Variable compression range control from 0 to 100%

announcing the “Thrillseeker” audio plug-in series

I’m bringing sexy back

The brand new and upcoming Variety of Sound Thrillseeker audio plug-ins series is going to be a plug-in collection premiering Stateful Saturation which is a sophisticated DSP core system for musical harmonic distortion generation based on authentic and truly stateful non-linear models.

Stateful Saturation takes advantage of some sought after analog qualities and preserves them accurately during their transfer right into the digital domain:

• high frequency shimmer and sheen without digital harshness
• depth and ‘3d’ imaging side effects before distortion itself becomes apparent
• audio transient dynamics that remains vibrant and alive
• natural and impressive bass response

Stateful Saturation opens the door for quite a number of amazing applications ranging from smooth harmonic exciters up to convincing amplifier effects and the DSP core can easily be set in context whether it’s a compressor output stage or a preamplifier circuit, just to name the two.

the side effects of intermodulation in audio processors

typical IM distortion in a digital compressor

The general and most obvious effect of intermodulation components in audio signals is distortion of course – hence the concept of “intermodulation distortion” (aka “IM distortion” or simply “IMD”). IM distortion and harmonic distortion are two pairs of shoes and must be defined individually as already shown in the short essay about “myth and facts about aliasing” but more on this later on.

The existence of intermodulation components can affect the performance of an audio production in various ways. In the best case, IMD components are a desired artistic effect e. g. to obtain heavily crushed audio effect signals but in the worst and rather common case, they are one of the contributing factors which deteriorate the overall audio quality and might ruin a production.