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.
Baby Audio Transit
Baby Audio are relatively new kids on the block, making some innovative and very groovy plugins that a number of influential producers have adopted and lauded.
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Accentize dxRevive
dxRevive is a speech restoration plugin, designed to correct audio problems such as background noise, clipping, overly-reverby recordings. It can also restore missing frequencies using AI. Although designed for dialogue restoration, we thought we would have a look at uses for this in music.
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Kalide Collage
Collage is a “modular effects system” bundled up as a single plugin. Its processor modules include all kinds of effects like modulation, dynamics, EQ, filters, reverb, delays, distortion, panning and width controls and more. But that doesn’t really tell the whole story.
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Eiosis e2deesser
Eiosis was the brainchild of renowned plugin designer Fabrice Gabriel, who set up the company before teaming up with Steven Slate to co-found Slate Digital.
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PSP FETpressor
Polish plug-in designer PSP has been producing hardware inspired plug-ins for nearly 15 years. The plug-in solutions tend to be tools in their own right with a generic analogue feel to them, but not specific emulations.
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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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