Recording - February 2014 - 62

PLUG-IN OUTLET
plates in Lexicon's PCM bundle and to Universal
Audio's UAD-2 EMT 140 emulation. It lacks some
of the tweakability and decay times of those, but
sonically it holds its own nicely and really captures
the authenticity of the original hardware.
Other improvements include better metering,
including the ability to integrate iZotope's Insight
meter collection which we reviewed in our December
2013 holiday Gift Guide. Many of Nectar 2's models now include better and more intuitive tweaking,
improved high- and/or lowpass filtering, and more.
On their own
As mentioned above, if you get the Production Suite
version, you also get the Breath Control module, which
is used for automatically cutting out breaths between
spoken and sung phrases, and the Pitch Editor.
Functionally, Breath Control has not changed
from its module in Version 1 of Nectar, but due to
the extreme power it needs for look-ahead reading, it makes sense to run it separately to avoid
the enormous latency it creates. (It was left out of
Nectar Elements for similar reasons.) In my experience, Breath Control is better off being rendered
or track-frozen offline rather than run in real time,
so having it as a separate plug-in isn't a huge loss
in terms of workflow.
The Pitch Editor is also not new, but graphically the
original (which was buried in the Pitch module) was
cramped and hard to work with. It was so hard to
get at that I favored the advanced vocal tuning built
into Cubase, to which I'd switched after years of
using Antares Auto-Tune. I expect that may change,
however, as in my initial tests Nectar 2's pitch correction is an aural improvement over both of them!
While you can still hear the obvious T-Pain effect
if you overstress the correction, what I am not hearing in Nectar 2 is the artifacts like the digital
popped intros of words or the sizzly digital ends of
sibilant notes that the other programs occasionally
produce. Also, the newly added vibrato for adding
a bit of life back into heavily corrected notes is
done quite well. This is some of the smoothest pitch
correction I have used, hands down.
Horsepower
As for CPU consumption, Nectar is a bit heavier
in load than many stand-alone compressors or
EQs. But Nectar's load is not much different than
if you had pulled up similar standalone plug-ins
that do the same thing and chained them together.

Delivery: Web download
Formats: RTAS, AudioSuite, AAX, VST, VST3, Audio Unit
Requires: Windows XP SP3 (32-bit)/Vista/7/8; Mac OS X 10.6.8 or
later (Intel only)
Copy Protection: online authorized serial number, offline
challenge/response, or iLok USB key
License: single user/iLok
Documentation: Help button opens HTML manual in your web
browser; PDF Help Guide available for Web download
Price: Nectar 2 Standard Edition, $229; Nectar 2 Production Suite
(including Pitch Editor and Breath Control modules), $299
More from: iZotope, www.izotope.com.
Nectar 2 only draws power for the modules which are actually on and in
use, so it really is not bad in many applications. Overall I could get three
full-blown, every-process-on instances of Nectar 2 running on both my Mac
and PC (both quad-core i7 machine with 8 GB of RAM) at about a 50% load
in Cubase.
Conclusions
I do admit I am a bit of a Nectar fanboy, simply because it has been one
of my primary tools for video dialogue and podcast recording/mixing on a
weekly basis ever since I got to know it for my initial review three years ago.
It allows me to work quickly and intuitively without any sacrifice in quality.
Nectar 2 is a step up from the original in every way, well designed and
well thought out. The improvements and additions are fantastic, and I see
the program continuing as my main vocal sweetener for quite some time
to come.

U-He-Satin Tape Machine
By Paul Vnuk Jr.
U-He is a German software company, started by Urs Heckmann,
and known for its softsynths such as Zebra (still popular and having
just celebrated ten years on the market), Diva and ACE, as well as
modulation, filter, and time-based effect plug-ins such as the Uhbik
collection, Filterscape and MFM2. U-He's newest creation, the company's take on tape-machine emulation, is called Satin.
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RECORDING February 2014

U-He calls Satin a Tape Construction Kit, and in its development the same modeling methods were applied as during the creation of the analog modeling synth Diva
(reviewed September 2012), resulting in a virtual tape
machine of the company's own making rather than one that
would emulate/model an existing "real" tape machine.

http://www.izotope.com

Recording - February 2014

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