Why Doesn't It Null? bx_console Amek 9099

[Music] hi and welcome back i've had a few people ask me about the bx console plugins questions like why can't i get them to know are they any good and are they better than using fabfilter plugins as there's a new one in town i thought it was time to take a look note that this video isn't sponsored in any way not even with a free copy of the plugin which means i'm going to start by talking about pricing i'm not sure what this one will sell for when they actually release it but the usual plug-in alliance model is to have a relatively high list price but regularly put their plugins on sale for a fraction of that price with further discounts available via vouchers they're not the only plug-in company to take this approach and i assume it works or else they wouldn't bother in fact it's worked on me i've impulse bought plugins from them on at least two occasions without demoing them first because i was bumped into it by a time limited offer one of those has worked out for me when i found it useful the other not so much i won't name it because there's nothing inherently wrong with the plugin it just doesn't click with me and i should have tried it first so on the one hand i don't feel like this is a major issue if this is what they have to do to survive and keep making plug-ins in a capitalist society then so be it on the other hand i note that lots of plug-in companies seem able to thrive without such manipulative marketing practices and i wonder if sometimes they're counterproductive if i take the time to demo a product properly i might well miss the promo and i'm highly unlikely to then pay the full ticket price i'll wait until it goes on sale again by which time maybe something else will have caught my attention instead anyway back to the real questions is it better than the fabfilter plugins for example which has a long answer and a short one the short answer is if you get better or quicker results with it then yes it is and really that's the only valid answer as well but i'm guessing what you really wanted was my opinion and let's start by addressing the fundamentally different approach to the interface now i've made no secret of the fact that the fabfilter eq is my standard go to which i load with a hotkey but this wasn't always the case in fact it wasn't really so until i first started making fabfilter videos let me give you a little background back in those days i was still working regularly as a live engineer and the industry was rapidly switching from analog consoles to digital and i was not happy about it i had two main issues with the first wave of digital desks that were widely adopted the ergonomics were terrible and they sounded like so they were difficult to use stressful in a live situation when you're under pressure and even when i managed to stay on top of it all and not make any silly mistakes i was personally really happy with what i heard from the pa but then soundcraft released their vi6 console which had great ergonomics color-changing faders to warn you when you were controlling something other than your main mix and was the first digital console i ever used that sounded good to me so the vi6 was intuitive and fast and to be fair so were many of the next generation consoles from other manufacturers with technologies like touch screens helping but i still had two issues the first was a general point about knobs when working on an analog console if i need a certain pot like an effect send or an eq gain i glance down at the console to find the right channel and get my hand on the correct knob then i adjust it by feel with my eyes back on the performers on stage and i can tell just by feel where that knob is set i don't have to look at it again with the digital console i look down select the channel in question to drop its parameters onto a set of encoders locate the correct encoder and then i keep looking at it as i turn it because a ring of leds around the outside or maybe a parameter readout on a screen is the only feedback i get regarding the setting there's no tactile feedback like with a real analog pot so mixing on a digital console means spending more time eyes down looking at the console and less time watching the performers and reacting to the performance okay so what was my other issue well i hated graphical curve displays for eqs after years of dialing in eq purely by ear i was suddenly being presented with graphs of what i was doing and all of a sudden found myself adjusting eq parameters to make the curves look right obviously i tried not to but no matter how hard i tried i would keep catching myself making adjustments that i couldn't justify by anything i was hearing simply because it looked wrong and that really pissed me off so back in those days i actively avoided the eq plugins with graphic curve displays like pro-q as it was at the time i remember even being disappointed when one of my existing eq plugins was updated to include one so while i was a fabfilter customer before they became my clients i hadn't tried their eq thinking it just wasn't my style until i had to feature it in a video after using it for a short while i had a revelation the traditional knob only style of eq interface that i was used to and had grown up with is the best option for a physical analog control surface but doesn't lend itself well to mouse control you can only adjust one parameter at a time and there's none of the tactile feedback that you get from a pot however the fabfilter interface despite its totally different approach actually got me much closer to that feeling of being in control that i enjoyed with an analog desk suddenly i could work just as quickly with a mouse as i could with an analog eq and the more i used it the more my other eq plugins started to feel slow and clumsy but that doesn't mean i've changed my view about eq display curves i've got better at avoiding it but i still sometimes catch myself tweaking just for a prettier curve and i still consider it a real problem so while i've decided that the benefits of being able to work quickly and precisely outweigh the disadvantages of a graph display that doesn't mean you have to and if you go the other way that's perfectly valid too of course we have to bear in mind that the fab filter guys have yet to release a channel strip plugin so you'll need four separate fabfilter plugins to match the features on offer in the brainworx plugin on the other hand the feature set of those four fabfilter plugins would vastly outstrip that of the console plugin with 24 bands of eq instead of four for example a bunch of different compressor styles to choose from and a massively greater range of saturation and distortion options from saturn than you get from the console plugin of course it's inevitable that if you accurately copy an analog console you'll be copying its limitations as well like having to choose between eq'ing the signal path or the compressor's sidechain there's no inherent reason why a plug-in couldn't do both at the same time but then again there's nothing to stop you loading another instance if you need more eq just like back in the day we'd sometimes patch a channel into another channel because we'd run out of bands okay so we've talked about pricing ergonomics feature set what else oh yeah how does it sound i guess that matters too and again there's a fundamental difference in approach compared to the fabfilter plugins fabfilter gives us theoretically perfect eq curves and remains clean and free of saturation unless you explicitly load saturn and add harmonics while the console plugin defaults to adding subtle saturation which can be removed or increased with the thd knob and promises more unique and perhaps more characterful eq curves with options like sheen and glow which sound like they could be fun now i think there's a common suspicion with eq plugins that digital eq is basically always digital eq and that so-called analog modeled eqs merely limit the control ranges and slap on a vintage style interface while there undoubtedly have been plug-ins guilty of that it's not something i would expect from plug-in alliance or brainworx to make quality products as far as i've been able to tell i don't have a real console to compare it to but i'm expecting it to produce different eq curves to pro q3 not necessarily curves that you couldn't recreate with multiple eq bands in the fabfilter plugin but possibly curves that you're less likely to end up with when using a more perfect style of eq of course the compression and limiting will have its own character i can assess how versatile and useful i think they are but ultimately whether it's better or worse than the fabfilter compression will be a subjective judgment and of course there's the tmt issue tolerance modeling technology that promises to recreate the subtle interchannel differences of a real console i suspect this is the key to the difficulties some people have had trying to run null tests but is it a useful feature or just a marketing gimmick all right enough pontificating already let's have a listen i found a drum loop with a groove i like as a source but it's got a weird stereo image with the kick on the left and everything else on the right so let's address that first this stereo instance of the console plugin provides a handy mono maker knob so i can bring the low end of the kick back to the center or wind it up higher to mono the bottom of the snare as well or i could crank it all the way and mono everything except symbols and high hats at the top [Music] we also have an overall stereo width control which can widen the signal or narrow it honestly in this case i think we might be better off just going fully mono fabfilter don't offer parameters with the same names but you can easily mono the low frequencies with a side channel high pass filter in pro q3 [Music] or mono it completely by switching to ms mode for the output section and turning the pan ring all the way to the mid channel okay back to the console plugin and let's try the eq starting with a low shelf boost [Music] that sounds like it's grabbing a big chunk of my low end where's the frequency set 100 hertz-ish [Music] okay but my ears are telling me i'm affecting frequencies a lot higher than that as well listen to how the mid-range of the snare comes up as well when i boost [Music] that sounds to me more like 300 hertz than 100 in fact let's try to find it with a mid band okay that's the part of the snare i was hearing [Music] definitely way higher than 100 hertz [Music] and we're definitely getting a lot of that from our nominally 100hz shelf boost which is interesting let's try tuning it lower this is starting to sound more like a 100hz boost to my ears but it's actually tuned way lower than that according to the frequency knob the glow button is turned on by default i definitely want to know what that's all about so let's set the band back to about 100 hertz and see what it does wow that's a massive difference [Music] the plug-in blurb describes this as changing the eq curve but honestly the difference seems too big for that to me it's like we're switching to a totally different frequency [Music] if i adjust the frequency to compensate then glow off starts to sound a bit closer to glow on but that's still a massive difference interesting we've not run out of options yet however we can also switch it to a bell instead of a shelf an option i actually use quite often with this kind of desk eq when it's available interestingly the glow button still seems available and it still makes a massive difference to the result [Music] okay let's jump up to the high shelf it's set to 10k so let's give that a boost [Music] again sounds to me like we're grabbing a good chunk of the upper mid-range rather than just 10k above let's try turning off sheen and this now sounds much more like i would expect from a 10k shelf let's try cutting instead [Music] again with sheen off the eq sounds to me like it's simply tuned to a much higher frequency although i'm happy to believe that the shape of the curve also changes anyway i'm getting the impression that the glow and sheen options basically mirror each other as with them turned on the shelves sound like they extend much further up or down the spectrum respectively let's try the peaking option and again the sheen option makes a massive difference my ears are telling me that with sheen on we're getting a broader wider boost than with sheen off but i'm not getting quite the same sense that the actual eq frequency is changing as i do with the shelves this behavior is too peculiar for me to not want to examine it in plug-in doctor so here's a low shelf with glow turned off and here it is with glow turned on are you really going to tell me that these are both tuned to the same frequency i'm honestly not sure i like this the choice of curves is definitely a good thing as they don't sound at all the same even with the frequencies compensated but it seems to me that those frequencies should be compensated behind the scenes so that you don't always have to do so manually when switching and so that glow and sheen modes behave more as you would expect from the numbers on the frequency knobs that would allow you to set a suitable frequency for the band then just toggle glow or sheen on or off to decide which shape works better and would make it way more usable and useful in my opinion now assuming that these curves are accurate models of the hardware this means i'm having the temerity to criticize rupert neve's design choices however it seems that the plug-in developers are also not afraid to recognize areas where the original could be improved more on this to come but it does make me wonder how they decided which aspects were sacrosanct and must be accurate to the hardware and which they were free to improve or change let's check the peaking response for the low and high bands sure enough turning on glow makes the bell wider and so does turning on sheen for the high band but it's not just a simple widening of the bell despite what my ears told me it does look like the center frequency increases as well okay while we're in the doctor let's talk about these subtle differences between the left and right channels that you've no doubt noticed but been too polite to mention this is the tolerance modeling that i mentioned earlier and the left and right channels are modelling two different channels of a console with slightly different responses if we switch to the digital mode we can use the same channel model for left and right and eliminate the differences but we can still change the channel numbers when each channel gives us a slightly different eq setting i wondered if perhaps there was just a static filter for each channel giving each its own slightly different color that way but that doesn't appear to be the case with everything set flat or bypassed the plug-in is also totally flat and switching channels makes no difference at all the channel differences only start to emerge with some processing applied and seem proportional to the amount of processing applied which suggests that they are doing what they claim to be doing now the question is is that useful or beneficial okay so this is just my opinion but no i don't think it is let me explain my reasoning with the possible exception of stereo channels and buses i don't have the same settings for each channel of my mix the eq response for each channel will already be different i don't need the console to do that for me and those inter-channel differences are tiny compared to the deliberate and conscious differences i dial in in pursuit of a good mix that fits together properly given that that's the case surely a random change is just as likely to move two-channel settings closer to one another as it is to move them further apart have i missed something now maybe it's just me but the idea of randomizing the channel selection doesn't appeal to me either i mean either i'm happy with the mix in which case the last thing i want is all my eq settings randomly changing or i'm not happy with the mix in which case i'm going to try to identify what i'm not happy with and change it i'm not just going to keep pressing a randomize button until i hear something i like better also i wonder how important these differences are in the first place if the eq on one channel is a little more aggressive and boosts a little harder than the eq on another channel surely you're just going to tune those differences out by ear anyway you'll use a bit less gain on the channel with the more aggressive eq without even knowing it because you get to where you want and stop sooner when tuning eq frequencies usually you'll do that by ear and stop when you hear what you're looking for so if the frequency shown on the knob isn't quite the one you're getting that's not normally a problem but sometimes you need to make opposite boosts and cuts in conflicting sources like two guitar parts for example i don't see how the cut in one part being at a slightly different frequency to the boost in the other is in any way helpful in fact the precision with which a digital eq can make these kinds of opposing boosts and cuts has always seemed to me to be quite a significant advantage stereo channels or buses is the only situation where i might appreciate the feature but that very much depends on the context if i've created a stereo image by panning a bunch of mono sources i'll probably welcome some extra phase and frequency response differences between left and right to add a little extra width and depth of course that's not hard to achieve manually if you want to but if i've painstakingly tweaked the placement of a stereo pair to perfectly capture an ensemble i don't want any plugin messing with that stereo image without my explicit permission of course in that case you could switch the console to digital mode to use the same channel for left and right so perhaps this merely amounts to do you want your stereo channels perfectly matched until you explicitly tell them not to be or would you rather have them imperfectly matched until you explicitly tell them to be perfect there are a couple of changes that might make the feature appeal to me more first of all every instance i load appears to default to channel 1 or 1 and 2 if it's a stereo instance maybe that's just a reaper thing and this already happens in other daws but i would prefer if the plugin matched its own channel number to the daw channel number by default so your daw channel 1 would always be channel 1 in the plugin and channel 32 would always be channel 32 at least until you explicitly changed it my reasoning mixers who work on analog consoles typically have standard channel layouts that they always stick to the kick drum or lead vocal won't come up on random channels for each mix they'll probably always be on the same channel so that they can work more quickly and efficiently and not have to re-patch external processing so often or at all in that case the specific qualities of that lead vocal channel might arguably become a part of that engineer's signature sound i'll be honest i don't find this argument especially convincing the idea that clas mixes would come out significantly different if he happens to go with a different standard channel order seems a bit of a stretch to me but consistently using the same channel numbers for the same sources would be a more realistic copy of an analog console workflow than just randomly assigning channels in my opinion and on that note i would replace the randomize all channels option with one that just shifted all the channels along so channel one became two two became three and so on randomizing all channels is a bad idea in my opinion for this reason what if you press randomize three times it gets worse first then sounds better then gets worse again how would you get back to the better sounding result if you didn't make a note of the channel numbers for every instance of the plugin in your project you're not going to that variation is basically gone forever whereas shuffling all the channel numbers along would make it easy to get back to the best sounding combination after trying a few different ones before we move on i want to check the high mid band in the doctor if you press the times 2 frequency button the band can be tuned right up to 9k which is high enough for many digital eqs to start to cramp out of shape and i'm a little surprised to see what appears to be digital cramping notice how the gain always drops down to unity at nyquist regardless of the cue setting making the bell shape asymmetric that's a tell-tale sign of digital cramping and i'd bet real money that the original console doesn't behave like this i can prove it however by setting the sample rate higher if the bell becomes more symmetrical then we can reasonably conclude that this is in fact just a bog standard cramping digital eq and so it seems to be i confess i'm slightly disappointed by this not because i consider it a huge flaw i've tried to put cramping into perspective in some of my previous eq videos it's really only an issue when you need an airy high frequency boost and not even always then and it's even less of an issue when there's an impressively analog styled decramped high eq band available in the same plugin but if they can get that right for the high band why on earth not also for the high mid band alright we've talked enough about eq let's try the compressor [Music] this seems happy to get quite aggressive and snappy [Music] the release can also be very fast and aggressive but it's equally very slow and gentle at the other extreme this makes the compressor quite versatile although there does seem a slight tendency for the most useful release values to be clustered around the bottom end of the knob i was actually expecting it to be a bit more grabby and aggressive on the attack the feed forward of vca designs that are typical for large console channel compressors can have a tendency to choke transients but i'm not really hearing that in this case i might have found a reason for that but i'll come to it in a moment let's try auto release first this sounds pretty fast with this drum loop close to the sound i was getting with the fastest manual setting which is promising it suggests that the auto release will be genuinely useful and not just boringly safe all the time but i'll have to see how it reacts with some different material to form a real conclusion note that with auto release enabled the release knob seems to have no effect at all unlike some other compressors which still allow you to make the automatic response trend faster or slower one thing that annoys me slightly is having to look away from the compressor controls to see the gain reduction meter it's obviously not a huge deal but i would say it definitely counts as an ergonomic compromise purely for the sake of looking like hardware and i don't really approve of that kind of thing so let's try the limiter this is actually really punchy and aggressive which i like quite a lot the release defaults to its fastest setting which is really fast but can be much more sedate if you need it to be although again this tends to leave all the most useful settings bunched up near the bottom of the knobs range turning on the fast button kills some of the punch at the start though it's still just as snappy but we also have a clipping option which is exciting literally so in fact you can smash off the peaks if you want and spread their energy across the spectrum as harmonics instead or you can just shave off the top few db very transparently which can help if you're aiming to end up with a stupidly loud master interestingly we still have a fast button which still makes an audible difference which suggests to me that this is more complex and interesting than just a simple wave shaper under the hood there's also a gate actually it's an expander by default with a ratio control but you can switch it to a gate in which case ratio is replaced with a hold knob the gate has its own side chain filters you don't need to reassign the main ones above which is nice but honestly i can't find much more to say about it it behaves as i would expect an expander or gate to and i haven't found any peculiar quirks and as it turns out there may be a reason for that as i was planning this video youtube popped an official brainworx video into my recommendations in which mr brainworks dirk ulrich discusses the plugin and the original console it was modeled on and there were a few eyebrow-raising moments like when dirk discusses the gate section while we loved the tone of the eq and the compression we the gate is probably not the strongest part of that original console so we actually decided to go um beyond basically what this console offers and yes we created a dedicated gate that that is just very flexible so they decided the original gate sucked and designed their own instead that's fine i'm not going to argue but is this an accurate model of the console or not and if it's just based on the console and aims to improve on it why not other obvious improvements like being able to eq the compressor's side chain without losing the eq for your signal path why not even provide four bands of pre-eq plus four bands of post eq plus four bands of side chain eq all at the same time with the switch merely changing which controls are visible that wouldn't require any major interface redesign but would be way more powerful and could still be true to the original console sound just avoid using more than one set of eqs if you want to be authentic there were other interesting revelations as well however like for example this this plugin has a compressor and a limiter and in the hardware that's actually the same but they ran it in parallel and those two sections had to share a makeup gain also here in the plugin we actually run them in in series as you said so and then we have a dedicated makeup knob for each of the sections so the original console runs the compressor and limiter in parallel there's a very interesting technical reason for that which i'll come to shortly but the brain works devs thought that's crazy let's run these in series instead i mean okay both the compressor and limiter sections have mix knobs so they can each do parallel processing individually and that's definitely a useful and cool feature and incidentally one that you don't get on the real console but a parallel compressor followed by a parallel limiter isn't at all the same as a compressor and a limiter running in parallel with each other while i'm personally not particularly concerned about authenticity and how accurately the plugin emulates the desk i do nevertheless wish that parallel behavior was at least an option because i don't actually use limiters that often within a mix and the parallel behavior just seems more interesting and appealing to me but while there's an interesting technical reason which perhaps explains why the original console runs them in parallel there are no such limitations with a plugin when i'm sure the extra button could be squeezed in somewhere after all they found space for an option to clean the interface but now we come to the biggest bombshell in that video it seems the dynamics in the original console are not analog they're digital yes so as you can see the console itself on the desk has eq and aux sends and faders and stuff like this but no dynamics but then you have select buttons here and basically you have a screen over there and so it's they call it virtual dynamics but the um this is a computer that controls a real analog compressor and gate and first when when i was using this even i thought well that's probably a vca solution but it's not it's actually a discrete analog circuit but very unique and i i've never heard about anything like this i'm not sure if it's the only thing that does it but the one the only one that i know of um it has a dedicated a d and d a conversion uh ship basically so from analog to digital and back in each um channel and then the side chain processing is actually done with dsp which is very unique and very sophisticated in a way for an analog piece of gear i confess i had to watch that back a couple of times before i was confident i understood what he was saying i'm now about 95 certain that what he's describing is the following the actual audio path of the console remains fully analog but each channel also converts the signal to digital to feed a dsp which runs the dynamics algorithms this dsp calculates a combined gain reduction signal which is then converted back to analog to control an analog gain stage i would have assumed that gain stage would be a vca except dirk says the dynamics are not vca based but perhaps he just means they're not the traditional type of all analog vca dynamics anyway there are several interesting implications to this first of all as far as i'm aware a d and d a conversion always entails a little bit of latency not very much granted but you don't need to delay the sidechain signal of a compressor by very much to significantly affect the sound i would have expected a compressor with even a tiny bit of sidechain delay to have an unusually aggressive attack characteristic but i'm not really hearing that in the plug-in is that a characteristic of the original console genuine question i don't know if it is then surely it should have been modeled in the plug-in as well at least as an option and if it isn't how on earth did mr neve manage to avoid that issue i can't really let that pass without consulting the doctor again here's the attack stage zoomed in and with the fastest attack setting there is indeed a solid spike left behind seemingly unaffected perhaps this does represent the side chain delay of the original dynamics section accurately modeled by the plugin and this delay simply isn't as big a problem as i'm assuming it to be all right let's try the limiter in fast mode interesting that the spike remains i'm starting to think that this is in fact accurately modeled side chain latency and i'm just not as good at hearing the effect as i thought or perhaps i've just picked an example loop that doesn't want to reveal it the clipping option also doesn't affect that initial spike even in fast mode which is super interesting does it even count as clipping if it doesn't react instantly i'm not counting this as a criticism however as i like to sound when i tried it if anything this makes me more interested as as far as i'm aware none of my other clipping plugins behave like this at all of course another question that suggests itself is was the dynamics code ported to the plugin to guarantee identical results or was it reverse engineered without access to the original code and in fact dirk answers this question when we when we model analog gear i mean the way that the brainworx team in germany does that is of course by measuring end circuits if we if we have access to them with our partners in this case and so in this case this was more like a like a black box or gray box because if you have a dsp chip that does something then you basically have to use different methods and so it was quite challenging to to model this thing we spent a lot of time on this actually with the team no they didn't have access to the code and had to reverse engineer it so it's a digital compressor which they've nevertheless had to model as if it were analog except with even less information as there's no schematic it's just a black box does that count as the worst of all worlds perhaps but i also suspect i'm overthinking it as my ears tell me this is a good compressor that will be genuinely useful in a mix so there's that as well however i can't quite leave the subject there because there's another tmt issue now correct me if i'm wrong but the original console had dsp-based dynamics that were the same on every channel i mean obviously right the console designers were aiming to make every channel identical the differences between supposedly identical analog components were just an unavoidable reality not a deliberate feature and yet dirk decided those little interchannel differences were so important that he would add them to the dynamics section as well and then also um we still wanted to make sure that we have the tmt approach of course so while the eq is analog and we can again apply realistic tolerances for all these components that make up this cq we needed to to be more creative here for the dynamic section and but but we did so even the even the virtual dynamics have slight tolerances in attack and release times to which my reaction is honestly wtf if the original console has a magic sound then clearly that's not due to subtle differences in the dynamics because there aren't any at least not attack and release time differences as dirk describes the only analog style tolerances to model would be in the analog gain stage whether that's a vca or something else and couldn't make the attack faster or slower in any meaningful way it seems that when confronted with the identicalness of the channel dynamics in this console rather than conclude that okay the greatness of the mixes this console produces clearly doesn't rely on inter-channel differences at least not as far as the dynamics are concerned they've instead categorized it as a flaw that needed fixing why mmv as they say but i remain unconvinced all right let's try the filters [Music] these are slightly more interesting than you might expect as they sound reasonably steep with perhaps a touch of resonant boost around the cutoff so there's some useful extra tone shaping available here it's not just boring rumble and hiss removal now i've put this off long enough we need to talk about saturation on this innocent looking thd knob here let's start by turning it down and the sound gets perhaps a little more boring and sterile so let's turn it the other way and it gets richer spicier more exciting and as far as i'm concerned this is where all the console magic is to be found i'm not convinced that subtle interchangeable differences matter at all i'm not convinced that analog summing offers any advantages although of course that's not relevant to this plugin but i know from personal experience that if you send a sine wave through a large format analog console it comes out the other end with some extra harmonics on top you don't need to believe in magic to accept that that will change the sound and often for the better and i'm not convinced you need to look any further than this for an explanation of the analog console sound so i'm very much liking what this knob does to the sound so far and i also quite thoroughly approve of the ability to adjust the amount of saturation for all instances this can be a nice way to spice up a mix by adding harmonics to all channels at once or alternatively if you've got a little carried away with the thd knob while eq'ing and compressing all your tracks and the mix is starting to sound cluttered and congested you can dial them all back at once unlike the randomize all channels option the global thd control gets a big thumbs up from me however there is an elephant in the room that i refuse to ignore i can't see any over sampling options on the interface i'm not one of those people that's ashamed to read a manual so i checked that no mention of oversampling that doesn't mean it's not there of course so i'm going to have to run some aliasing tests here's a sine wave sweep shown on a spectrogram in acoustica i'm going to process that with one band of eq as the saturation goes away with all processing bypassed and let's start with the thd knob all the way down and as claimed this is totally distortion free with no extra harmonics appearing just like a fabfilter eq now let's try the default thd setting and we get a single extra third harmonic indicating some very subtle symmetrical saturation exactly what i would expect from a relatively clean and pristine sounding analog console except when that harmonic reaches the nyquist limit and reflects back down as aliasing that definitely wouldn't happen on an analog console and it suggests there's no oversampling at all let's try it with maximum thd and look at all that analog spiciness we're getting unfortunately it's coming with a hefty dollop of digital spiciness as well which might not tickle your palate in quite the same way of course it's important to keep this in perspective with the thd at its default setting the aliasing is probably too subtle to ever be a real issue and even with the thd cranked you would probably also need a source signal with lots of high frequency content before aliasing became a real problem it's important to remember that when i tried this out on a drum loop i liked what i heard aliasing included and that always matters more than what you see on a graph nevertheless i would happily swap the tmt feature for some oversampling options so i could crank the thd on my drum overheads with no fear of the symbols turning harsh and brittle due to aliasing while we're on the subject there's another issue that might help to put the aliasing into perspective strictly speaking dynamics processing like compression and limiting should also be over sampled as these processes can also add extra high harmonics and partials that can potentially fold back as aliasing but if you consider the lack of oversampling for the dynamics of floor well it's one that the original console also suffered from probably anyway i mean i suppose those dsps in each channel might have been over sampling internally but i kind of doubt it and while the gain stage is still analog any competent compressor designer will tell you that in fact aliasing in the side chain is a much bigger problem than aliasing in the gain stage so really the original console's dynamics are likely just as susceptible to aliasing as a typical plug-in compressor and that hasn't stopped it producing great mixes or being considered a classic console that's worth recreating in software in fact logically isn't that aliasing from the dynamics more likely to be a part of the signature sound of the real console than random variations in attack and release that don't even exist of course that doesn't apply to the clipping feature which isn't available in the real console i gather from the brainworks video that the clipping is basically just the limiter with really fast time constants honestly i would have expected this to produce lots of aliasing and be the aspect of the plug-in most in need of an over-sampling option but in fact when i try to test for it i can't really make any sense of the results i certainly can't produce clear obvious aliasing as i can from the saturation or the compression so all i can say is don't overthink it if the clipping sounds good use it i will be right well i've gone on way too long already and i haven't even mentioned null tests yet but seeing as i was specifically asked about it i'll address that before i go first of all there's the issue of nulling in instance of the console against another instance with the same settings this is pretty simple really if both instances share the same tnt channel number they will know otherwise they won't because as we've seen in that case they don't really share the same settings that probably shouldn't be too surprising then there's the question of nulling it against something else like a fabfilter plugin insofar as this makes sense at all which i'll come to in a moment it only really makes sense for the eq or filters i have no expectation whatsoever that i would be able to know this compressor against the fabfilter compressor and my failure to do so wouldn't tell us anything useful but it might be interesting to see how easily the fabfilter eq can match those unusual high and low eq bands especially with the glow and sheen options turned on not so much to determine any inherent superiority of one over the other but the extent to which they will tend to lead you to different results this video has gone on long enough already so i won't make you sit through the process let's just jump straight to the results through the magic of editing here's the best null i could get for the low shelf with glow turned off it's a pretty good null i might have been able to get it a bit better with some more tweaking of the parameters but i needed two bands in the fab filter to match the one in the console so if you just dial in a simple low shelf on both eqs you'll get slightly different results okay let's try with glow on notice how my fab filter frequency settings don't even remotely resemble those of the console this is 111.5 hertz according to the console but 1.5 kilohertz according to pro q3 which is just weird if you ask me interestingly the best null i could find was using a steeper 24 db per octave slope combined with a very low and gentle cue setting which isn't something i normally do in pro q3 perhaps i should try it more often nevertheless this time i only needed one fabfilter band to get a very good null which suggests that assuming you ignore the numbers on the frequency knobs glow mode on is actually less likely to lead you to a different place than glow mode off that's interesting and kind of the opposite of the result i expected peak mode with glow off that's an almost perfect null with just a single fabfilter band peak mode glow on not quite such a good null but the differences are still quite small with just a single fabfilter band although i might venture to suggest that the band is set wider than anyone would dare to while looking at a graph of the response let's try the high band shelf mode sheen off not such a good null this time even with two bands in the fab filter although it's still highly questionable where the difference differences at this level would ever be audible note that i got much worse nulls when i tried turning on natural phase mode in pro q3 but that didn't surprise me pro-q3 can't achieve that without adding latency and there is no latency in the console plugin this was the case with all the high band settings now with sheen on i could get almost perfect nulls with just one band equally good using the 6 db slope or a carefully tuned 12 db slope but notice the frequency setting 1200 hertz to match a shelf that claims to be at 8k crazy peaking mode sheen off biggest differences we've seen so far perhaps this represents differences in the approach taken to de-cramping the bell i'm still not convinced these are big enough differences to matter however but i've only used one band and can't see how adding more would help peaking mode sheen on a slightly better null this time although still not perfect it should be noted however that the bell simply looks too wide on the fabfilter plugin which might steer you away from such a setting while the console invites you to try it and doesn't judge you for it when you do this is more likely to result in a different sounding mix than any other differences revealed by the null test in my opinion okay conclusion time while the eq alone is slightly less unique than i expected there's no doubt that the sum total of all the features in the console plugin adds up to a unique kind of sound and workflow there's no doubt that you're likely to end up with quite different results using the console plugin on every channel instead of a custom chain of fabfilter equivalents but will it be better or worse i don't know in all honesty and i'd have to do a bunch of mixes twice to really form an opinion but my hunch is that if the console workflow suits you and allows you to work more quickly and efficiently you'll probably get better results from the console plugin and vice versa if you already know the fabfilter plugins inside out like i can reasonably claim to you'll probably get where you want to be quicker with those i nearly always find quicker mixes are also better mixes so you've probably already guessed the answer to the question will i be using the console instead of the fab filters in future i can illustrate the answer that you already know with this synth part i've used the stack feature to stack up two voices and hard pan them so this is like having two divas panned hard left and right and there's a mono compatibility issue as the part gets a lot quieter in mono i want to fix that issue by narrowing the stereo image for just the high frequencies how would i do that with the console plugin i can narrow the low frequencies with the mono maker for all frequencies but not just the highs whereas pro q3 gets that job done in seconds so even if i one day decide i want to make an amic-flavored mix with an instance of the console on every channel this is not an unlikely scenario by the way i'm still likely to end up with fab filter plugins on a bunch of channels as well now when assessing this type of console plugin it's probably not sufficient to just try it on a couple of different sources i mean the idea is you have an instance on every channel and use it as your main default eq and dynamics so here's a little groove i threw together with some guitar and a few synth parts all mixed exclusively with the console eq and compression apart from that one pro q3 on the stereo synth part and here's how it sounds with all instances bypassed this little demonstration proves nothing except that a mix will fall apart completely if you turn off all the eqs and compressors but preparing that demo has confirmed for me that i would indeed be happy to mix using the console primarily whether it was the original hardware or the plug-in version and i would expect to get good results doing so so am i going to buy a license well probably yes to be honest but i'm likely to wait for a sale because we're not stupid plug-in alliance we can see what you're doing with your prices okay that's all for now well done if you made it this far and i'll see you next time thanks for [Music] watching [Music] you

Channel: Dan Worrall

Views: 57,116

Rating: 4.9205098 out of 5

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Id: Hpm-7GzoKOE

Length: 54min 4sec (3244 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 05 2021