Sonnox Elite bundle?

[AeternusEternus]

Anybody have any experience with the Sonnox plugins? I'm trying out the demos (15 days with an iLok), and I feel pretty comfortable with them. I'm interested in gauging opinions from people who've used them before. The reason my interest in these plugins is peaked is because I have an opportunity to pick up the Elite bundle at an EXTREMELY low price through an employee discount. I figure, since all I really have are free plugins and Nebula, I could stand to have a higher-end bundle of some kind.

Two of the Sonnox plugins in the Elite bundle are an EQ and a reverb. Currently, I use Nebula for EQs and reverbs, which, it's pretty taxing on the PC, but I don't think I'm ever going to be willing to budge on using it for reverb. I really like some of the Nebula EQs, but if it's not something like the Doc Fear EQ, I often find that I can get the same effects by using free plugins, like what comes with Cubase or the Khakjakjijorus plugin. I haven't tried the Sonnox reverb yet, but I have played with the EQ, and it seems potent enough. I feel like it's really hard to impose overkill on my tracks with it.

The Sonnox bundle also has a Dynamics plugin (which includes a compressor, a limiter, an EQ/sidechain EQ, a warmth modifier, and some other stuff), a limiter, the SuprEsser, a Transient Modifier, and the Inflator. I use no compressor or limiter other than the Cubase stock plugs, and I don't even have an equivalent for any of the others. After using the compressor and the limiter plugins, my initial impression was that it was transparent enough that I was having a tough time figuring out if it was doing a good job or not. I'm used to hearing plugins do seemingly 130% of what I want, and I'm used to spending some time trying to undo some bad-sounding byproducts. I've since watched a review or two on the SuprEsser, and I feel like it will certainly do all I need it to do for my filthy vocals.

So, I feel like I might be able to get some mileage out of these because they're often described as transparent. I like what I've heard as I mess with them, but I'm not very good with compressors or limiters in the first place, so I feel like I'm constantly using the things wrong. Ultimately, I feel like I'll be able to reduce a lot of CPU consumption by replacing Nebula with Sonnox stuff, and possibly even get a better sound overall. I pretty much mix by accident, so I'm thinking these will enable me to pay more attention to the finer details.

Does anyone have any experiences to share? Will my time/money be wasted on these? Should I aim for something different? My experiences really are kind of limited to the Sonnox stuff and, very briefly, Waves plugins.

 

[Ermz]

The Sonnox stuff is great, if only for the EQ, Limiter and Inflator. The EQ is very transparent and does the job with a nice enough UI. The limiter is one of the most transparent I've heard, and the Inflator does some weird shit to the track which maximizes loudness. I still can't work out what it's doing, but it doesn't seem to cause audible phase problems or any crazy artifacts that you'd expect. Either way, it's a good bundle which I pull out every now and then when I need some extra bands of EQ after the SSL channels, or some limiting on the master bus.

Never tried the verb, but it seems to have mixed opinions surrounding it. Many call it a bit too washy. In all honesty, Nebula would probably do a better job, but at the end of the day it is just a convolution process, so you can't really tweak many parameters in useful and flexible ways. It's all about workflow for me, and Nebula breaks it like no other software I know of. I'd sooner just go out and buy a Lexi than have to deal with it.

Also, what sort of character does the Doc Fear EQ have?

 

[AeternusEternus]

The Sonnox stuff is great, if only for the EQ, Limiter and Inflator. The EQ is very transparent and does the job with a nice enough UI. The limiter is one of the most transparent I've heard, and the Inflator does some weird shit to the track which maximizes loudness. I still can't work out what it's doing, but it doesn't seem to cause audible phase problems or any crazy artifacts that you'd expect. Either way, it's a good bundle which I pull out every now and then when I need some extra bands of EQ after the SSL channels, or some limiting on the master bus.

Never tried the verb, but it seems to have mixed opinions surrounding it. Many call it a bit too washy. In all honesty, Nebula would probably do a better job, but at the end of the day it is just a convolution process, so you can't really tweak many parameters in useful and flexible ways. It's all about workflow for me, and Nebula breaks it like no other software I know of. I'd sooner just go out and buy a Lexi than have to deal with it.

Also, what sort of character does the Doc Fear EQ have?

I like Nebula because you can tweak as much as you can sample. If you felt like sampling from 0.0001 ms of reverb time to 10,000 ms of reverb time, in increments of 0.0001 ms, you could do it. It'd be an enormous program, though, haha. After trying lots of reverbs from pedals to free VSTs to Waves, this was the one. I've never heard anything like it, because it can take characteristics from ALL of the aforementioned units and reproduce them almost flawlessly.

The Doc Fear EQ has a weird vibe to it. If I understand it right, it was some obscure little tube equalizer that for whatever reason sampled really well with NAT/Nebula. It's got a very limited scope because it wasn't sampled to be enormous, but no matter what I put it on, it always seems to do exactly what I want. If you're removing mids, it's very smooth. If you're adding lows, it's beefy and not overpowering. If you're removing highs, it's a very pleasant and rounding effect. The Mid- program will suck the life right out of a guitar tone if you're not careful, though.

There are five programs for Doc Fear: Hi+, Hi-, Lo+, Lo-, and Mid-. The unit was sampled in such a way that like, basically, you're selecting presets. For instance, the Mid- program has -2, -4, -6, -8, -10, and I think -16db for the gain knob. For the freq knob, if I recall, it's just 200, 300, 400, 500, and maybe 600hz. The way the sampling is done is basically you set those values in NAT, and then click "go." When you click go, it samples the first set of values (-2, 200). It samples for however long you set it to sample for, then it stops and waits for you to change it to (-4, 200) and then click go again.

So, sampling the BBE 882i Sonic Maximizer that I sampled, I did it from 0 to 10 on both knobs, so I did 11 x 11 = 121 30-second samples. It's kind of annoying and time consuming, but in the end, I've got a Nebula program that I feel performs just as well as BBE's latest VST outing. The problem is, what if the Lo Process knob on 3 is too little, and on 4 is too much? You can't select 3.5 unless you've sampled it.

Anyhow, I'm more than willing to show you what the Doc Fear EQ will do. Give me a sound sample, and I'll process some D.Fear EQ functions on the file and post them here.

And back to the Sonnox stuff..

What you've said about the plugins definitely makes me feel a little more comforted. My inexperience with a lot of these things makes me feel like I don't really know what to look for, but maybe if I had a more capable unit, I could develop my mixing and mastering skills. Like, my mentality for a long time has been to make due with what I've got, and it's worked pretty well for me. But, recently the mentality shifted to, what if I had a Sonnox bundle with which I could make due? So, I dunno.

Transparency is probably best for the way I like to track and mix, so these are probably really good for me. But maybe there are greener pastures. Do you know how these stack up against UAD bundles?

edit: Actually, nevermind the UAD bundles. I don't think I'm interesting in adding hardware