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Anyone Using Console Emulator Plug-Ins? Whaddya Think?


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I've gotten into them more, but am particularly surprised by what happens when you add a little crosstalk. It seems to be one of those "happy accident" things. Also I've been checking console emulators to see if they add and ringing to square waves to be more "inductor-like," and most of them do. Interesting.

 

Haven't really played with the recent Slate of Waves emulations, my experience is mostly with the ones built in to Studio One and Cakewalk. The difference is subtle, but when bypassed, the mix loses 5% of...something desirable.

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I thought console emulators were sorta snake oil. When they were bundled with Sonar I needed to take a look at them. I was surprised that they maid a difference. Here's an example of a sine wave at 100 Hz. the one on the left is the original waveform, the three on the right are from three different console emulators. Mostly they reproduced some non-linearities that seemed related to input transformers and distortion. The only ones I've used with crosstalk are the ones in Studio One.

 

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There seem to be a number of different things that suggest "console emulation" so any suspicions of snake oil are certainly reasonable. Some simply emulate distortion characteristics and filter shapes of famous name brands, no different than "channel strip" plug-ins (hardware or software). But when you want to emulate a real life console, crosstalk between channels is a possible feature. Another, is to introduce small random variations in each channel that represent the spread of component tolerances. For example, if you set all the channels to the same frequency, Q, and boost or cut and apply the same signal to them, what comes out might have a couple of tenths of a dB between them at a measured frequency. Same goes for pan settings. It's a good excuse to mix with your ears rather than your eyes.

 

Try running a console emulation through Room EQ Wizard and look at frequency response and harmonic distortion sweeps to get a more accurate picture of what's going on between input and output.

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