Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Exitixe : a sonic enhancement

Ever heard of the BBE Sonic Maximizer ? Love it and/or hate it, with some old badly recorded mix, it can do very impressive things. No it is not only an EQ, it tries to phase the high harmonics (with harmonic distortion) with the lows : there is a lot a speculation about what it does here. It is my favorite mastering swiss knife.

Reading about this sonic thing; I've came to another excellent thread: http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=91439 Bottom line, it's about a reversed engineered version of a BBE 482i; so you get a little bit more insight on what the BBE process does. Liteon (a Reaper user that already have a bunch of fx into vanilla Reaper) actually did a great implementation of this effect in JSFX.

I've liked it so much that I have made a "personal" VST multi platform version. Also come with a fugly interface with "wood pattern"; just like the plugins in the 90's. The knobs are by AZ.


The code is also fugly (the plugin wrapper) but the DSP algorithm of Liteon is pretty impressive. Try it !

Source Windows OS X

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I tested this against the new iteration of the bbe sonic maximizer plugin which i bought recently. Overall it's amazingly close. The highs are a bit dirtier but the lows sound damn near identical.

Everyone who doesn't already have "the sonic screwdriver" should grab this immediately.

Just don't overuse the high boost.