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.
Eventide Tony Visconti Tverb
Berlin, 1977, in Hansa Tonstudio: Tony Visconti is recording Bowie's soon-to-be hit song Heroes, but he has run out of tracks. Hansa's studio 2 was the historic Meistersaal Hall constructed in 1910 for classical music performance.
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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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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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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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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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Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate
Engineers have been gating drums since the Kepex was introduced by Allison Research in 1970, and apart from the 1982 Drawmer DS201 adding useful key filters, not much new has happened in the world of noise gating, apart from the ‘look ahead’ function afforded by...
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McDSP ML8000
Silicon Valley plug-in boffins McDSP cite ML8000 as the next generation in advanced limiting technology. The ML8000 plug-in features two discrete processors. The first being multistage, multi-band lookahead peak detection and limiting, followed by a broadband master limiter with some rather flexible controls.
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Toneforge Guilty Pleasure by Joey Sturgis
Joey Sturgis is an American record producer with a studio in Indiana and a reputation as a leading expert working in the metalcore scene.
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Empirical Labs Arouser
Dave Derr introduced his first hardware unit the Distressor in the mid-1990s and scored remarkable success with what was perceived to be a modern advance on classic knee compressor designs like the 1176 and LA-2A.
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McDSP AE600
The AE600 is the latest in the line of active EQs from this Silicon Valley based plug-in company. Offering six bands of both active and fixed EQ this is more than just your average plug-in.
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Focusrite Liquid Mix HD Plug-in
Since Focusrite impressed everyone with their remarkable hybrid digital and analogue Liquid Channel microphone preamp (using a clever combination of convolution software and emulation hardware), they have brought their ‘Liquid’ convolution technology to a popular audience with the compressor and EQ emulating Liquid Mix, a...
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McDSP Retro Pack
McDSP have for over a decade been providing plugins which are much loved by professionals. In particular, the long-established FilterBank EQ and CompressorBank plugins are standard requirements for many mixers, with rock-solid sound quality and low latency.
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Universal Audio UAD Plugins
Universal Audio are widely respected not only for impressive hardware reissues and original designs, but also for the quality of the ever increasing plugin range available for the UAD range of cards.
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Audio Ease Speakerphone
The clever Dutchmen who brought us Altiverb have been beavering away at Speakerphone for some time. It finally arrived proclaiming to be the ultimate speaker simulator plugin, and includes 5GB of background environment samples.
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