Last night I downloaded a demo of the Algorithmix Red EQ plug. Holy sh'it, its really good man. And when I say really good -- I mean really good on a hastily recorded, scratch pad song in a project running at 44.1khz. I never saw much reason to get excited over a \"clean\" EQ until I heard this thing, so I'ma talk some sh'it about it below (even though I only spent one night with it, and should probably take more time to get over the \"new toy\" syndrome, so I don't eat my words later...)
-- the lows are SOLID and well defined (this is what sold me the minute I fired it up.) So thick... All this time I thought a thumping kick was all about careful compression in addition to some crazy notch&boost filter combination... \"I want to boost the lows, then get rid of the mud it left me with, and then I'll cut out these frequencies to save headroom on my comp, blah blah blah...\" Waste of time, a simple shelf filter on this thing just did it. A little tweaking made it even better.
--The highs are open and smooth -- took me a little longer to appreciate this, for some reason it didn't jump out at me right away, but after a while of fooling with HighCut and HighShelf combinations, it becomes apparent.
--The imaging is incredible. Alot of EQ's feel like they smear the stereo field, or intentionally play with the phase/width in an unnatural way to make things appear more analog and wider sounding, but at the expense of clarity. Others seem to simply collapse the image and add a wierd coloration. But this is just so open sounding, in the most natural ear pleasing way I ever heard in a pluggin.
--The mids are warm -- but the kicker is that they're clean to boot... Q's get pretty narrow, up to 1/15 of an octave I think, but it never sounds too sharp. Maybe for extreme problems a sharper bell might be needed, but otherwise boosts sound good, never grating on the ears.
--In my Nuendo project running BFD and three NI Guitar Rigs (Yup, it really was a hasty in the box recording!), I was only able to run the plug in medium resolution mode with my sample buffers set really high. ... And I have a Dual CPU AMD 1700xp setup, nothing to brag about nowadays, but pretty respectable in the speed department. That left two more levels of resolution which I suppose could improve the sound moreso, although I most likely could only use these via a mixdown export.
The downside -- it costs around $1300US, which is the stratosphere for a plugin. But I'll bet there's plenty of guys in here who do this for a living that would probably pay that kinda money if it lives up to your expectations the way it exceeded mine. I'm already trying to find ways to rationalize the purchase. Was slowly collecting parts to build a homemade Sontec-like EQ circuit but I think I might break down and just go this route instead -- whip out the credit card like a dumbass and worry about it later.
Alright, I'm done kissing these guy's asses -- but I'd love for some of you guys to give it a try and tell me if I'm f'cking crazy... or that it does sound that good.
-- the lows are SOLID and well defined (this is what sold me the minute I fired it up.) So thick... All this time I thought a thumping kick was all about careful compression in addition to some crazy notch&boost filter combination... \"I want to boost the lows, then get rid of the mud it left me with, and then I'll cut out these frequencies to save headroom on my comp, blah blah blah...\" Waste of time, a simple shelf filter on this thing just did it. A little tweaking made it even better.
--The highs are open and smooth -- took me a little longer to appreciate this, for some reason it didn't jump out at me right away, but after a while of fooling with HighCut and HighShelf combinations, it becomes apparent.
--The imaging is incredible. Alot of EQ's feel like they smear the stereo field, or intentionally play with the phase/width in an unnatural way to make things appear more analog and wider sounding, but at the expense of clarity. Others seem to simply collapse the image and add a wierd coloration. But this is just so open sounding, in the most natural ear pleasing way I ever heard in a pluggin.
--The mids are warm -- but the kicker is that they're clean to boot... Q's get pretty narrow, up to 1/15 of an octave I think, but it never sounds too sharp. Maybe for extreme problems a sharper bell might be needed, but otherwise boosts sound good, never grating on the ears.
--In my Nuendo project running BFD and three NI Guitar Rigs (Yup, it really was a hasty in the box recording!), I was only able to run the plug in medium resolution mode with my sample buffers set really high. ... And I have a Dual CPU AMD 1700xp setup, nothing to brag about nowadays, but pretty respectable in the speed department. That left two more levels of resolution which I suppose could improve the sound moreso, although I most likely could only use these via a mixdown export.
The downside -- it costs around $1300US, which is the stratosphere for a plugin. But I'll bet there's plenty of guys in here who do this for a living that would probably pay that kinda money if it lives up to your expectations the way it exceeded mine. I'm already trying to find ways to rationalize the purchase. Was slowly collecting parts to build a homemade Sontec-like EQ circuit but I think I might break down and just go this route instead -- whip out the credit card like a dumbass and worry about it later.
Alright, I'm done kissing these guy's asses -- but I'd love for some of you guys to give it a try and tell me if I'm f'cking crazy... or that it does sound that good.
But from all soft EQ's I came across (owning URS/Hydratone/UAD/Poco with Oxford) this one is da bomb and comes closest to real hardware EQ. Yeah, that good...(no affiliation whatsoever)