Are plugin manus holding back quality for performance?

I'll answer your question partially.

Casey at Bricasti has been a friend for quite a few years. I'm pleased that he honored me by asking me to provide a software interface for the excellent M7. Casey has been pretty public in saying he doesn't believe that there could be an in-the-box implementation of the M7. Let's just assume that's true and move on. But a lot really depends on what a reverb developer thinks is audible and what that developer's skill set is all about.

Any developer is going to underline certain things about what's important in a reverb and what doesn't matter so much. That applies to Casey and it applies to me just as much. We'll give you different answers, but that's just part of being human. Another part of being a developer is just what your skill set is. In hardware solutions, you're worried about an algorithm. But you spend as much (or more) time worrying about things like parts cost, the number of buttons and where they are, safety and regulation testing, how bugs are fixed in the field, and more. I certainly had to worry about that when I was at Lexicon, but there were other engineers in the company that did the heavy lifting in that area. Bricasti has a much smaller staff, so their software skills have moved in a direction to cover those necessities.

For me, even though I spent a couple of decades developing hardware, I've got a completely different set of concerns. Buttons (or their virtual equivalents) are free to me. The cost of regulation testing is borne by Apple, or Dell or HP. My worries are about operation system compatibility, other stuff running in the background, or software security. My skills (aside from the algorithm stuff) have moved in that direction.

So, in the end, could a Bricasti reverb be a native product? I would think so and Casey wouldn't. Could an Exponential Audio product be delivered in a hardware device? Just reverse my previous answer. But in the end, this business is made mainly of small companies and those small companies are made up of people with talent, but bound by the 24 hours-per-day limit.

I (and I'll veer into pure opinion here) think that it's really unlikely you'd see Bricasti in a UAD device. Aside from the issues I've presented in this response, the fact is that the DSP in those devices (as well as HDX) has been obsolete for years. To jam something in would require an effort that simply wouldn't yield enough return to make it worthwhile. The processors in today's personal computers are leaps and bounds more capable and I don't think you'll ever see a "next-generation" of DSP chips that gets anywhere close to that.

So to answer the second part of your question, I don't even know that price IS a determining factor. Vintage devices were quite a lot simpler and their DSPs were absolutely primitive. But how many people have interest in making them for a market that's already saturated? There will come a time (if it's not already here) that nobody's much interested in yet another 1176. That's a piece of gear that Grandpa used and there have probably been better solutions for quite a while. There have always been generational components to everything, so why should music be any different?

So mix with what you like (and what you can afford). In the end it's all about your ears, your talent and your musical sensitivies.

Depends on the plugin maker. Some go for quality over everything else, like Fabien & Vlad at TDR, at least in their mastering specific plugs.

I think that's a great idea. I would love to see something that looks like a Pultec, with a digital brain and only one function. I'm curious if it would sound better and/or be cheaper than midrange analog hardware.

I think some older plugins actually sound better like Cranesong, Echofarm, and even the L1. Overloud's stuff seems about as good as any and uses hardly any cpu. Recently I went back to using the CLA76 and CLA2A and I'm favoring that combo again. Newer computers like a 1950x Threadripper, 7820xe, or even a Ryzen 7 are probably hundreds of times more powerful than these DSP cards.

cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2320-vs-AMD-Ryzen-TR-1950X/m1735vs3932

661% more powerful than the I5 chip in my old computer. It's in multi-core scoring and in my experience that's what matters most for what we do. These UAD things are probably closer to that I5 chip than the 1950x. I've tested Acustica stuff and have always come away underwhelmed. Their hardware comparison videos show the plugins sounding thinner, which is why they probably disabled comments. There may be some things about a hardware and tape workflow that can't be reproduced by stacking plugins.

I've seen more posts popping up with people claiming the Seventh Heaven is a near clone of the M7.

There's some old GS thread where people were preferring the dreaded Bomb Factory 76 over some reputable piece of hardware.

I'm sure there's some plugs that could sound better with higher cpu usage, but the trend lately is for more efficiency without cutting quality. Like Disto-S. Then there's stuff like Elevate that are heavy on cpu. I'm not sure how viable it is for developers to make heavy cpu stuff considering how many people on these forums work on decade old desktop computers, laptops, or even stuff so old that it runs Windows XP. My thinking is that we'll continue to see higher quality and lower cpu stuff since everyone is not running stuff with 1000 and higher multi-core scores.

I think John's question is valid, and I imagine at some point, computing power will have gone so far forward, that we probably will see plug-ins that are so close to the hardware the difference is negligible.
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I haven't used a Bricasti, but have heard one at AES, and was honestly blown away. I've had the Bricasti convolution reverbs that were floating around for a long time and never used them. I've used the Relab XL-480 and the UAD EMT-140 on everything for years, and the Relab was the closest to the hardware I'd heard to date.

Then I bought the Liquid Sonics 7th Heaven. I don't hear quite the depth the Bricasti has, but that said, it sounds better than both the Relab and EMT-140 on every track I compare, so they got something very right, and I got the $60 basic model. If they ever have an upgrade on sale, I'll go for it, but $139 for the upgrade seems overpriced to me. I've had a few people ask what reverb is that more than a couple of times.

Recently Sound Toys gave away the Little Plate, which is another EMT-140 copy, and I can use it in place of the UAD easily, it's that good.

Isn't Bricasti coming out with a lower priced version? If it sells  for $1299, or better yet, $999, I'd probably go for it, as long as I could adjust pre-delay,

Exponential was super nice and clean last time I heard one.

Not sure ....

I need to rent one of these damn things to just get the questions answered for good.

Wow. Nimbus looks great. Gonna demo

I loved Bomb Factory 76 when it was native on Mac OS9. Dawn of the plugin era, it sounded great. Off to a good start. Then it was gone, for me.

(Though to this day I still have an iLok auth for it.   )

It's the only comp on this two mic DP DAW recording from the day of MacOS9.. 




 

Hi Wiz, 

Not to get into the weeds off topic, that was a MOTU PCI interface at 44.1 kHz, all digital, from 2002. 

To be fair, that two mic recording sounds pretty good today.  My early multitrack ITB from that era didn't hold up sonically to the recordings I'd done 16 trk of ADAT to my Mackie 32/4 mixer and mixed down from there.

But I miss that Bomb Factory plug!

I believe that many of the small indie plugin houses are much more quality conscious than most of all of the larger, more well known manufacturers, which are more likely to set their sights on the mass market. However the smaller, often one man publishers are much less likely to have access to sophisticated analysis tools that could help them get closer to hardware quality. OTOH this probably acts as a stimulus for bringing out products that are not emulations of well known hardware.

As for "performance", isn't that mostly a function  of processor hardware these days? You can get the same subjective performance out of a much less efficient piece of software on current machines....