new IK multimedia t-racks - with new 670 & pultec emus!!!

[rhythmtech]

just used this for the first time today.

bloody lovely to be honest. silky and smooth when you want with the opto comp and the fairchild has a lovely bite. not a perfect emulation by other accounts but i dont really care because ive never heard a 670 in the flesh and this just sounds bloody good.

it is however a total cpu hog and just 6 instances choke up nuendo when in high res mode. however, in reaper ive gotten 12 instances in high res and 35 in low latency mode before my cpu craps out! (which is pretty promising), will test it later with fxtelepot but i can see the latency being a big issue on 1mbit LAN network.

anyway even for somone with a slow cpu the emu is amazing to even slap onto your 2 buss.

especially when you look at the price! waves jjp is stoopid money and the uad2 card looks like its gonna need a monster power unit and cooling system to run it!

heres a mix ive been working on for a while (posted a rmx up a few weeks back)

re-started this morning in reaper and took off all the processing and re-processed with t-racks. have a 670 followed by the opto comp on the 2.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XMJO84EO

[The_Laughing_Man]

Tested it too.
Walked away without noticing much worth raving about.

For a start, is it worth £350 quid?
I don`t think it is really.

The Opto compressor is nice, it is fairly musical. But there is nicer stuff out there.
The Pultec Emulation (Yawn yet another) is ok, but I would say no better than the URS plug of same
The Linear Phase EQ is very nice, but no better than some of the other high end linear phase EQ vst on the market.
The metering is very nice, best thing about it I reckon.

The fairchild, well....it`s just blah really

Fairchild compressors are seriously overhyped, turgid and loose, and rubbish for dance music.
Their hype is bizarre, motown got rid of theirs, and if you read enough pro audio opinions about it, you`ll see that it is not the holy grail at all, the Fairchild serves a certain need, but overall is quite a noisey crunchy thing, and not suited to many applications.
If anything, the holy grail of mastering compressors in terms of versatility is the Focusrite Red 3. Which seems to be the compressor that most mastering engineers will rate as the one they will always need in their rack.

I`m really not sure as to the generic usefullness of a fairchild emulation for mastering duties, and it`s being hyped as some "make your stuff sound better" magic button. Which it just isn`t.

Ignor emulations in terms of do they sound like the originals, they never will, tis better to assess soft comps on their own merits.

There is far too much hype in the vst world to confound the average amateur.
Mainly because the vst market is now so commercially viable in comparison to boutique hardware.

So overall, as a mastering tool, I don`t think you`ll find anyone in the business taking it seriously, it might be useful for mixing purposes, but latency and cpu hogging are a bit of an issue.

However as an all in one learner tool standalone for mastering it might be worth a tinker (not for £350 though) and good for this purpose.
Also for a quick "cheapy" master to run your mix through for playing in the car or something, it`s ok as well, but I don`t think it`s anywhere near as good as they hype it to be.

Overall I`d mix and match better products for a mastering chain rather than use this. And frankly, for software compression, there isn`t a lot that can touch the Nebula 3 for realism when it comes to representing the "open" sound of hardware compression.

But it is very pretty.