VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Hestoft]

GearSlutz is an interesting forum for the hopelessly gear obsessed, such as myself. While there is a lot of BS and WAY too much my mic is bigger than your mic boy talk, some very informed professionals hang out in the High End forums.

They have a very long, ongoing discussion of plugins at: http://www.gearslutz.com/board/so-much-gear-so-little-time/418022-lets-do-ultimate-plugin-analysis-thread.html

It is very long and involved and I actually read most of it, so let me post a short summary here to save you all the trouble.

The discussion concerns plugins and the fact that some of them product "artifacts" or "non-harmonic distortion" as a result of the signal processing they do, and that these artifacts can be measured and graphed.

The takeaway bullet points are as follows:

-Many plugins, including some expensive and well-loved ones produce artifacts

-These artifacts can be greatly reduced by recording and processing at 88.1 or 96kHz, which gives the algorithms more data to work with, causing fewer processing and math errors that show up as artifacts.

-There is a debate as to how audible these artifacts really are. However, their effect is cumulative if you are using multiple plugins in a mix. Also, a plugin that does not artifact at setting A may do so badly at setting B.

-There are some relatively inexpensive or free plugins that do not exhibit any artifacts at all.

-Plugins with no or extremely low artifacts are as follows:

Compressors:
- Cockos Reacomp (free)
- psp Oldtimer...99$
- The Glue....99$

Limiters:
- Voxengo Elephant....117$

Equalizers:
- DDMF IIEq....15$
- DDMF LP10.....15$
- Equality....150$
- Boot Eq....free

Effects:
- Echoboy...179$

-Nobody suggests that you throw away your $1,000 Waves plugins, or plugins that you feel work for you, especially for us since we use them so sparingly. But, if you are in the market for some plugins, those above are worthy of a listen, and may be preferable to other, more expensive ones if the sound is equal to your ears, since they exhibit no artifacts.

As always, your mileage may vary.
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Ralf-Finn Hestoft
The Great Dane

[Dayo]

Thanks for that Ralf. It can take an age to go through a typical Gearslutz thread and whittle out the mis-information, back stabbing and general rudeness.

[mpelishek]

I know this was posted like a month ago, but I just joined, and just read it. I too have tried to navigate gearslutz, but I'm not an audiophile, and its hard to know even where to start. These kinds of summeries are awesome. A great breakdown of the info, I'd love to see more!

[Mike Sommer]

And if you don't know what you're doing, you'll just make a mess of it all.

Often times, doing nothing to your audio is the best thing.
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The Blog:
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Acoustics are counter-intuitive. If one thing is certain about acoustics, it is that if anything seems obvious it is probably wrong.

[georgethetech]

I second that, Mike.
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GeorgeThe.Tech
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