Slate Digital Infinity EQ Plug-in
PULSAR SMASHER
CALL OF THE RAW AND GRITTY SOUNDS!
Pulsar is a new kid on the audio plugin market. They
have one other plugin which is the Mu com-pressor
and we reviewed that one very shortly before. It's one
of our absolute favorites. The smasher is their new
offering and is free for a limited period!! It's a custom
modification of the 1176 compressor circuit, a twist on
the famous all buttons in mode. It can add thickness
and grit to any drum or bass track, or completely
crush a bus, producing an aggressive sound
It is is very easy to use the plug-in with an input, output
and mix knob. That's it! The compression style can only be
described in one word - Aggressive. They say the modeling
technology guaran-tees a perfect emulation of the original
device’s behavior. From the saturation of the magnetic flux
in the inductors to the precise response of the transistors,
to the effects of tiny calibration de-fects, everything is
perfectly reproduced. While we don't have a real 1176 to
test it out, it does sound amazing for what it does. It's ideal
for raising the level of ambiances in a drum bus, but al-so
for adding presence to vocals or warming up guitars or
basses. It does not treat vocals with too much love unless
your intent is some extreme leveling/parallel saturation.
The Mix knob of the Smasher allows precise adjustment
of how much thickness you want to add to your sound.
Pulsar Smasher consumes as few system resources
as possible – despite the complex algo-rithms at work.
Smasher takes full advantage of modern CPUs to do
more with less. But if your computer can stand it
and you enjoy making it suffer, you can always turn
oversampling on, pro-cessing at rates up to 384kHz!
Its a really fun bit of kit to have and its
currently free! Grab is ASAP!
ONE STOP SHOP!
Another tool in the arsenal of slate digital! It's a 24-band
graphical EQ aims at the modern engi-neer who wants to
work fast and get great results. It claims to be optimized
for mouse control and touchscreen surfaces, with compact
control groups for the ultimate economy of motion. It
looks fairly straightforward, although the interface looks
slick and modern. Its control groups are truly unique.
It allows you to chain multiple bands together and have
them behave with each oth-er. This allows for quite a
unique and interesting workflow and in some cases,
allows for some pretty unique EQ moves. The EQ itself is
extremely transparent no matter if you use it for subtle
carving or dramatic tonal transformation. And, with
continuously shapeable slopes, simultaneous cut and
boost, and powerful Mid/Side and Left/Right processing,
the Slate Digital Infinity EQ is extremely versatile.
They stress a lot on the workflow of this EQ. Its intuitive
interface is laid out to minimize mouse movements,
with tight groupings for related functions and no right-
click drop-down menus. Dou-ble-click on any point to
create one of up to 24 filter bands, and use the sliders that
hover above or below the band to shape the slope and
adjust the Q. For pinpoint listening, you can click the
headphone icon to solo a band. And, the Infinity EQ lets
you affect multiple bands simultaneously by selecting
and linking band groups. Paired with automation, the
tone-shaping possibilities of the Infinity EQ are endless.
On the sound front - there’s zero-latency analog
matching and it sounds good even as you push quite
a bit with no brittle highs or flabby lows. They’ve
included a slew of helpful presets to speed up your
process and inspire creative tone-crafting.
This EQ is quite interesting and we are quite intrigued to
see how it fits within the workflow of dif-ferent engineers.
Digital EQ’s are seen as a purely functional tool and its
hard to switch from the ones that an engineer is truly used
to. This plugin could very well take its spot, especially be-
cause it comes included if you already have the Slate All
Access Pass. If you think about it, it's quite a sweet deal!.
The
Score Magazine
highonscore.com
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