The Score Magazine November 2019 issue | Page 47

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