With many years experience working as recording engineers and producers, our review team of George Shilling and Russell Cottier know the good from the bad. In many cases it's a matter of taste, some prefer one EQ over another but we try to provide unbiased and objective reviews of the equipment tested.
LiquidSonics Seventh Heaven Professional
Seventh Heaven is a high-end reverb plug-in from LiquidSonics. LiquidSonics has been bringing advanced reverb plug-â¨ins to the market for the best⨠part of a decade. Based on⨠Fusion-IR technology these â¨are more than just convolution⨠reverbs.
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Vertigo Sound VSC-3
German based Vertigo Sound has been a name in high-end audio gear since 2007, launching with the VSC-2.
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Miktek MPA-201
The Miktek MPA-201 is a dual-channel Class-A microphone preamplifier providing a certain amount of character from its multiple transformer stages.
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Roger Mayer 456 Microphone Pre-Amplifier
1964 he started building effect pedals for Jimmy Page. Mayer also designed and built pedals used by Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and session guitar legend Big Jim Sullivan.
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Newfangled Audio Elevate & EQuivocate
Eventide partnered with Newfangled Audio (founded by former Eventide DSP developer Dan Gillespie) in 2017 to launch the Elevate multiband artificial intelligence driven limiter.
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Toontrack Superior Drummer 3
Toontrack has a solid reputation in the software instrument world primarily for its flagship product, Superior Drummer. Back in May Toontrack flew journalists from across the world to Galaxy Studios, Belgium.
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AMS Neve 1073 OPX
AMS Neve have recycled the 1073 mic preamp countless times, and adding digital connectivity is not new for Neve.
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Vacuvox U23m
The first audio compressor was the Telefunken U3, used at the 1936 Olympics, and in the 1940s came the U13. Then, Rohde & Schwarz developed the third generation U23 in 1953.
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Leapwing Al Schmitt
Leapwing have scored themselves something of a coup by bagging Al Schmitt’s talents and working with him to make something useful for mixing and mastering engineers.
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Scope Labs Periscope
There have been quite a few ‘character’ microphones that provide a non-linear response, e.g. the Bastard BM88. It’s cheap fun for a bit of lo-fi telephoney character if you are going for a wax cylinder sort of sound.
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Warm Audio Bus-Comp
Since 2011 Warm Audio of Austin, TX have built up quite a range of studio outboard based on classic designs, marketed at bargain prices. The Bus-Comp is no exception.
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Bettermaker EQ232D
Many Bettermaker outboard processors have passed through my studio including the knob-less (but still very physical) version of the hardware EQ232P, with its excellent sonics and clever expansion on the Pultec theme.
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Tone Projects Unisum Mastering Compressor
Rune Lund-Hermansen is the brains behind Tone Projects – clearly a man of many talents, as for nearly 7 years he was Lead Product Designer for every wine drinker’s favourite phone app, Vivino.
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Bettermaker Bus Compressor
Bettermaker’s new Bus Compressor treads a now familiar path for the Polish hardware manufacturer. They have built a reputation for digitally controlled, recallable, high quality analogue hardware since the EQ230P Pultec-style EQ.
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Eventide H9000
Eventide invented the Harmonizer in the 1970s and have updated the line as technology has progressed. The studio where I started in 1984 had a H910 in each studio, so I have always enjoyed a bit of harmonizing.
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AMS RMX16 500
When I started work at Livingston Studios at the end of 1984 there was an AMS RMX-16 in both studios. This was the only source of artificial reverb other than the EMT140 plates.
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