New saturation plug on the market...

[Aaron Smith]

http://wavearts.com/products/plugins/tube/

Anyone tried this yet? I haven't demoed it yet but it looks pretty cool. My only experience with Wave Arts is their Panorama plug, which is actually quite awesome and I've found useful in many different situations (binaural/HRTF directional panning type stuff).

 

[Charles J]

Supposed to be pretty awesome but because of the immaculate emulating process they implemented, it's VERY VERY CPU-Heavy.

Only complaint I have heard thus far... can't wait to check it out!

 

[slayercannibalsuffohead]

Just downloaded the demo, it works a treat on the guitars (actually tightened up the tone) and bass. Working effortlessly on the imac, no problems so far. Liking it better than Lo-Fi.

 

[Deadstar]

cpu nightmare but the best saturation plug

 

[::XeS::]

Shitty plugin also if it sounds good. Holy shit, how can they do a plugin that switch the cpu% from 40% to 86%???????????

 

[Morgan C]

Jesus, one instance of this plugin uses up 30-40% of my CPU. Nothing but a Sneap preset plugin is worth that, thats just ridiculous. the EQ is quite nice, and its a bit tighter than PSP when you back off the lows, but honestly.. its like 100x the CPU usage. I don't even see how that's possible.


edit: totally take that back. This thing kills on vocals. I was using it on snare drum before, but holy shit on vocals. Compared to PSP its just SO much more 3d and in your face. Depending on the price of this, I can definitely see myself using it and then bouncing it down straight away for vocals. Wow. Knowing Waves though it'll be a few hundred dollars and unfortunately I can't justify that atm.

Raw Vox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/324723/VoxRaw.mp3
A: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/324723/VoxA.mp3
B: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/324723/VoxB.mp3

A and B are a blind shoot out; one is PSP and the other is Waves, at approximately the same settings (~60% drive, PSP is set to Tape3; Waves has no EQ). All files including the raw one are highpassed at around 100hz and crushed with 2 successive compressors, no other processing. Fucking killer vocalist though.

 

[Fragle]

not listening on monitors right now but on regular desktop speakers, but to me B sounds best. A is somewhat muffled and almost too distorted....

....now, please let B be the psp one so i don't have to shell out even more money haha

this thing does look killer though.
i'm curious, in which ways is the demo limited?

 

[punkrockacademyfightsong]

checked them out on my monitors and have to agree that B sounds better. A is indeed too distorted and too compressed, but then again 60% drive on tape 3 is pretty extreme

 

[lumpong_bayag]

didnt listen to wavearts yet, but "A" sounds PSP vintage to me

 

[Morgan C]

Interesting.
A is the Waves one, B is PSP.

 

[Ermz]

I think blaming the developers for high CPU usage is jumping the gun. The fault lies with the slow progress of consumer level CPU technology, not with people who actually want to do accurate emulations. There is a lot more to emulating tubes than a lot of the devs want you to think, and contrary to popular belief, something that barely touches your CPU isn't exactly going to be a component-level emulation of whatever unit it's claiming to be.

I haven't tried this out yet, but have heard good things. I heard some tests done on bass guitar and drumbus, but they sounded absolutely horrid. Not sure why - maybe user error.

 

[::XeS::]

I have a macbook pro...it's not a top level machine actually but you can't buy a 5000€ macpro only to run a new tube saturation plugin I think
I can't put it in the master bus as tube saturation because at the end of the mix my cpu reaches the limit. Anyway I tried it in a pseudo master (with less plugins I can use it) and it seems very good.