AudioMedia - July 2008 - (Page 44)

Powered Plug-Ins Powered Plug-ins Is your DAW not doing enough for you? If you’re running out of tracks, try powering-up your plug-ins. RICHARD WENTK rounds up the field. THE REVIEWER Richard Wentk is the owner of Skydancer Media, a digital production company providing sound, image, design, and consultancy services to various clients in London and the West Country. ProTools has defined the powered plug-in market with its TDM standard, but TDM plug-ins come with a significant price premium, and so there’s been a trend among other manufacturers to release products that fly under the TDM radar and are aimed at complimentary markets. If you’re running out of native processing power but don’t need an über-DAW with hundreds of tracks, you can slot in one of these units and take the load off your CPU. At the same time, you can add a high end gloss finish which native effects might struggle to provide – although the difference between a generic EQ and a good EQ has been shrinking as DAWs have developed, so this isn’t the obvious given it might have been ten years ago. Emulations of classic analogue boxes are an obvious element in the USP, but it turns out that some of the newer all-digital effects can sound at least as good. The convenience factor of having multiple instances of an effect can trump the retro-fad appeal of having a virtual vintage compressor in your virtual rack, with virtual metering and virtual controls, controlled with a not so virtual mouse. Is there a catch? None of these products are entirely issue-free. While a couple of products offer PCI and PCI-E card versions which can slot into a PC or Mac, the rest use Firewire 400 to connect the processor to the host. This can cause problems if you’re already using a Firewire 400 port to connect to an audio interface. It’s easy enough to slot an extra F400 card into a PC, but laptop owners have more limited options. Even though the F00 has never quite taken off in the mass market, it would have been useful to see it being offered as a high bandwidth option. Latency is always significant. It’s impossible to use most of these plug-ins in a live situation, and some attitude adjustment may be necessary if you’re trying to mix with them in real time. Also, a few systems have inexplicable quirks and limitations. For post applications, it’s worth keeping in mind that most of these effects are stereo only – surround support is very rare. Most of these units are designed for music mixing rather than post, but aside from the lack of surround features, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you need to sweeten a voice-over, tighten up the dynamics in a radio bed, or apply surgical EQ to a sound effect, you’ll find they can sound better and be more versatile than a more familiar EQ tool might. Just like the real thing – a couple of the knobs are the wrong way around. SSL Duende Duende is SSL’s attempt to make its high-end console technology more affordable. And mostly it succeeds. The range includes three products – a PCI-E card, a halfrack mini-processor with half the usual compliment of DSPs that can be unlocked to offer the full set, and a 1U rack-mount processor. The Mini processor is bundled with the channel strip plug-in, while the PCI-E card > 44 AUDIO MEDIA JULY 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of AudioMedia - July 2008

AudioMedia - July 2008 Contents Recording Post Broadcast What's Up UK Geofocus: France For the Record Special Report: Develop Preview SE Electronics 4400 Sennheiser MKH800 Twin Tubetech Club Final Cut: Wanted Smart AV Tango Doctor Who Made in America DSP Roundup Product Sampler: Summer Hits Edirol R44 Video Guide AMSR Fame - Le Musical Waves MaxxBCL Yamaha AD8HR Special Supplement

AudioMedia - July 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.