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.
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.
Read Russell Cottier's reviewSeventh 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.
Read Russell Cottier's reviewEventide partnered with Newfangled Audio (founded by former Eventide DSP developer Dan Gillespie) in 2017 to launch the Elevate multiband artificial intelligence driven limiter.
Read Russell Cottier's reviewToontrack 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.
Read Russell Cottier's reviewLeapwing 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.
Read George Shilling's reviewMany 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.
Read George Shilling's reviewRune 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.
Read George Shilling's reviewEngineers 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...
Read George Shilling's reviewSilicon 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.
Read Russell Cottier's reviewJoey Sturgis is an American record producer with a studio in Indiana and a reputation as a leading expert working in the metalcore scene.
Read George Shilling's reviewDave 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.
Read George Shilling's reviewThe 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.
Read Russell Cottier's reviewSince 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...
Read George Shilling's reviewMcDSP 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.
Read George Shilling's reviewUniversal 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.
Read George Shilling's reviewThe 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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