Loque wrote: ↑09 Jun 2021
manisnotabird wrote: ↑08 Jun 2021
Is there really that big a market for new EQs and compressors? Must be.
Just throw in some saturation device, call it analog and sell thousands of units.
Many of these seem legit if you are an old hand and jonesing for some device you used in a studio years ago which happens to saturate this or that band in exactly the way your nostalgia tells you is right. If that's what you want, I can't think of a downside to paying money to save time getting there.
But yeah the word "analog" has magical powers when used in some circles. There's one hip-hop producer on Instagram who talks about analog outboard devices being secret weapons as if floating point samples don't exist and tape saturation and analog clipping can't be simulated if that's what you want.
Discovering the CompressMaster preset on Scream was an eye-opener for me. Instantly my crappy little tune sounded much more mersh, and it took me a few minutes to realize how my unwitting indoctrination during the early/mid 1980s biased me. (Yes, I said "biased" during a discussion of tape compression. Deal.
) Now that preset doesn't even sound especially good to me; it just sounds old and presses my nostalgia buttons, which can be good for a specific purpose, but it also sounds thuddy and boomy in a way that's not exactly bad but makes me wonder why anyone would prefer it in the absence of nostalgia.