Magic Death Eye
Compressor
The Fabulous and Magical!
The name might sound might sound a bit over the top, but
the plugin really delivers. Its made by DDMF in partnership
with boutique manufacturer Magic Death Eye. I first heard of
this company from a leading mastering engineer in the US, a
multiple grammy winning engineer who swears by this piece
of hardware for all his compression needs.
Its a tube compressor with a surprisingly linear response
across the frequency spectrum and this leads to very pleasing
and subtle harmonics that add a lot to the sound while
sounding extremely natural.The Magic Death Eye compressor
excels at vocals, bass, keys, or just about any instrument
you can think of. Its gentle compression curve is also suited
for master buss duties. There is a broad range of sidechain
Acustica Audio
Scarlet4
Plug-in
An Interesting
Take!
Continuing
with the theme
of mastering
plugins, we get to
a mastering EQ
thats very new
to the market.
Its from a plugin
manufacturer known for their extremely accurate emulations.
They are also known to be quite premium.The Scarlet4 is
based on a hardware unit with the same name considered to
be one of the reference standards in mastering grade EQs.
They have emulated this classic EQ sound into this beastly
plugin.The most amazing feature of this parametric EQ
is it’s musicality. Unlike other parametric EQs, which can
have just as much of a negative, as well as a positive effect
timings for just about anything a mix can throw at it.Input
level controls the amount of signal that enters the intelligently
modeled input transformer, tubes, and output transformer.
Threshold controls the amount of signal fed to the sidechain
circuit and can be thought of as the amount of compression
applied to the signal. The amount of compression available is
also determined by the amount of input signal present.Clicking
on the "output adjust" will produce a fader with a +5dB to
-20dB range acting as a master volume post compressor circuit.
This is a modification to the original hardware unit in where
there is only 3db of fine adjustment available.The "time" knob
controls the attack and release of the compression. "1" is the
fastest attack and release, "4" is the slowest. "D1" and "D2" have
a fast attack, and a dual release, from medium to slow.The
"attack" switch, modifies all the "time" settings with an overall
Fast, Medium, or Slow response.Its quite a lovely addition to
your roster especially if you find yourself looking for tubey
compressors in mastering situations
on your audio, this unit is hard to make sound bad.The EQ
has a pleasing sound of its own, its high transparency not
with standing the high frequencies are defined and silky. The
controls are fairly straightforward even if it looks like a lot of
knobs at first. There’s 3 bands and 2 filters for L and R which
can also be used in Mid-Side mode. The stepped controls have
a LOT of frequency points and the choices are really useful
bands and the gain controls go upto 6dB on either side. The
interesting part of this plugin are the presets. They call them
AI (Artificial Intelligence) Presets. The difference being,
unlike normal presets that are a different settings for different
situations, these presets are build based on data sampled from
real life mix sessions by top engineers. Any of the AI presets
will assess audio being fed into the plugin and then based on
the data stored in its memory, it will automatically modify
EQ settings to emulate what the reference engineer would’ve
done in the situations. It seems to work a lot of time and offers
a good starting point if you need one. Its an interesting take
on presets and an indication of the things we can expect from
plugins in the future! Its quite a nice mastering EQ to have,
very accurate and its got a slight classic touch as well.
The
Score Magazine
highonscore.com
45