Hardware to go with Fusion

What’s your actual budget?

What are you trying to achieve in your mix: dimensionality snd weight ?

If are looking used, there is a SB now in classified, they don’t come up that often used.

Now would also be a good time ti buy a used Bettermaker limiter mki as so many are on the market.

It’s complicated. Old investment accounts that should have gone to my siblings and I about two decades ago that my parents forgot about. There’s a little more to it than that. Budget depends on financing options too. Depending on what I elect to go with, I’ll end up financing some with other income.

I’ve never been satisfied with the ability of plugins to recreate the sounds of classic albums. And very few modern albums seem able to pull it off. Rave in Fire may have done it the best of anyone I’ve heard. When I hear the effects of Fusion and other good hardware, it’s very much a “that’s more like it” thought.

I notice that on a lot of classic stuff that mixes aren’t always well-balanced. But it works because that analog gear was so forgiving. Right now I don’t have the budget for multiple real expensive things. Maybe I could swing a Black Box and a Bettermaker piece if I’m lucky. But things may change to where I can negotiate to get something more. For all I know I’d be perfectly content with Neve’s $650 500 series chasis thing and two 542 tape modules. It’s tough to say because my experience with hardware is limited to owning Fusion 11 months and a disjointed hourlong experiment with AA’s Black Box.

Keep your money. You don’t need this stuff The primary purpose of the color boxes is to make records not sound plastic on crappy playback systems or just crappy playback circuitry. This includes a lot of common monitors and crappy converters.

So you distort it more! Console plugs, tube plugs, fake pres. Man I like all that shit but it’s all distortion to distort it more than the customer’s crap. A lot of it cannot equal the complex distortion in a mixer or nasty stereo compressor even if it measures clean it still has complex distortion that cannot be captured by a simplified circuit model and most multichannel interfaces are either crappy like a Focusrite or rme or pretty clean like a Lynx. So you do the producer special and stack up the plugs until the sound stops getting cooler and a lot of crappy monitoring setups encourage you to do this just like they encourage you to run stuff through analog gear that might as well be a mid guitar pedal or total mush

A mix that wasn’t terribly recorded and uses Kotelnikov GE or MDWDRC2 and a clean eq sounds rank on NS10s and cool in a car is because NS10s are high distortion speakers. If it sounds plastic on JBLs but punchy on a better system is because of the sound the JBLs are adding and terrible crossovers. All of the 305/306/308/705/708 have weird midranges because of the crossovers. Genelecs sound more like Genelecs than anything you’ll hear outside the Genelec brand too.

You can tone chase as much as you want but there’s a lot of good stuff in the box now and you no longer have to crap all over everything with something like Inflator or Waves garbage to get a consistent “more distorted than the system” distortion on all playback systems. Sure you can go to the purple background site or Reddit and hear mastering engineers defend crappy limiters and clippers and hear people crap on waves but defend the crappy well-advertised lofi plugin of the month that sounds worse than Waves Ren Maxx and a million testimonials from guys with analog hardware but 80 instances of ozone about it “sounds analog man and made me sell my hardware” then it sounds worse than an 02R or a Behringer product and looks absolutely rank in an analyzer.

You don’t need this stuff and probably have everything you need already to made a cool sounding mix. You just need good material to start with.

/rant

Dan

If we're just talking pure mixing, yeah I do it all with plugs. Fusion was better than a bunch of plugs on my sub-mixes, but I found it a bit awkward because it sounds so much different from plugins. Then there's the whole recall thing. If I were to mix with hardware added, Bettermaker or Wes Audio seems like a smart idea so that I can control it all with plugins. If stuff is tracked well with a lot of hardware, I imagine that negates the need to use a ton myself. I've played around with this song called Burning Bridges by Dark Ride from that Cambridge mixing library and I don't even use Satin on the tracks because it feels like too much. So, I go to Cranesong Phoenix there. Still use Satin on sub-mixes, but with a lot less color. Jake from Blood By Design told me he used nothing but plugs on The Ancient One. Valhalla Room, Waves, amp sims, stuff like that. His mastering guy must've soaked it with hardware. The album sounded brilliant on a Sansa Clip and Beats Ep headphones but on the Aurora N, I can hear some issues. The headphone section of the Aurora N is pretty unforgiving of bad sources. But makes great sources sound phenomenal. A lot of those 90's Black Metal albums just reveal themselves to be horrific balls of bad distortion. The best ones still hold up like Stormblast and Storm Of The Light's Bane. I tried some Gorgoroth for the first time and it was just really bad. Blizzard Beasts was another that the Lynx revealed all the flaws on.


I'll try the Portico and maybe Culture Vulture later and see how that goes. Apparently my internet upload speed is not so hot even using a wired connection with one of the more high bandwidth cables. To really thoroughly test these hardware devices, I'd have to pay Access Analog for at least $100 worth of time. I'm trying to be conservative with how much I spend on hardware. With how much GPT4 advanced over ChatGPT so quickly, I'm wondering if in a year or two we see some big breakthrough in audio tech where someone figures out how to model most any analog hardware 100% in a way that works with current computers. Or maybe some big innovation happens with home computing and we get computers 10x more powerful before I could even pay off something like an SPL Iron on layaway. It's inevitable that all this hardware will be accurately, probably within the next decade.

Anyone use Vertigo plugins? The comparison between the VSC3 plugin and hardware was impressive enough that I got the VSC3 a few weeks ago.

Yep me too.

It might work for Dan, but to my ears software doesn’t get within a country mile of the sounds I can get from my hardware, be it tracking, mixing or mastering.

A second hand Porche Panamera would be nice though!.

Not that my wife would let me buy one if I cashed in my hardware LOL.

Wow.  Retro fetishism eh??  

You obviously have put some thought into this and are very passionately anti-outboard / analog. Seems to be all about compressors and distortion for you as you contemplate analog gear. I'm just naturally curious - how much outboard, and what type of outboard do you own? Also, you do metal if I recall, right?

i am not anti outboard or anti analog. I am anti the top selling compressors on B&H and Sweetwater, anti what is hyped on gearslutz, and Very anti what is advertised on gearslutz. If you can find a bunch of flexible gear or buy separate X, Y, Z to do X, Y, and Z that’s cool but I find I can still manipulate flexible tools to do more of what I want most of the time. The problem is most of them sound like garbage and are built cheap from IC example builds and circuit and dsp textbooks. And they’re harder to learn most of the time. Like parametric eqs with constant q that have limited headroom or poor circuitry and suck on boost or dynamic processors that suck when sped up or dug in. the most bare bones of those flexible one that I’ve liked are the old Oxford Dynamics and the recent Art Limiter and the others just get even crazier. Sonnox doesn’t even tell users outright that it’s a multifx processor with a single vca modulating the audio in the end and I learned things about the art limiter from the mxr 136 manual that aren’t in the clone’s manual.

I don’t use any analog compressors anymore to mix. I still have an RNC in a closet and have had a 160a and some other junk I never touched on a mix but Neither were ever really that much better than plugs even if all the 160 plugs suck. RNC kinda sucks too outside of super nice mode or basic envelope shaping duties and Presswerk and Molot killed a lot of desire to use it and buy others when I bought them a few years ago. If you want the stupid dbx 160 transient for example, the old free Molot always had more control and better tone. I switched to apogee symphony desktop from a multichannel motu AVB rig. Huge upgrade but only 2i 2out. I hated the motu inputs anyway and never used them for inserts when I realized the ouput circuitry was so much clearer than the input.

If I had the ins or a real symphony rack mount or something, I’d take an Aphex Expressor or two, maybe some modern vcas and cool eqs with fun inductor shelves and maybe a weird bus comp or flexible two bus distortion thing to patch in early and work around to get some ballistics gel and ride faders into. I still want to pull some underrated stuff out of live racks but A lot of what I see is beat to hell or is crap or reverb pricing has made it way too much money even on Facebook marketplace. The expressor is better than Presswerk much of the time for that high frequency expansion effect because there’s no phase shifted top end and less distortion.

A sort of small mixer would also be cool like an expanded version Of that Alice thing or a modernized old school Tascam but balanced but it would need to have a lot of insert points to go in and out of the daw more while summing and push the circuitry of while keeping the digital options. There are so many cool tones and processors that only work easily without heavy editing in the present with a digital workflow and stuff like sidechained dynamic eqs and automation of processors to carve out space in a way that the AI stuff like trackspacer and soothe can’t. Or recordings of guys stomping on pedal boards and you can edit and process everything differently. Think like gates on live sound mics or multiband stuff on a digital live console but this is in a daw and the processing doesn’t suck. Nova GE has an unintended use as a wicked channel strip for example that kills anything you can get in a console (or a channel strip plugin) at the cost of latency.

I mostly do metal and don’t use samples really at all unless they’re rendered into the track already. I found years ago that most of the “metal” drum samples itb sound awful unless heavily processed and the software doesn’t want you to extract the individual hits easily if only a few midi velocity ranges sound good. I might as well process it myself. And can get a pretty wide varieties of tone now itb even if I gravitate towards certain workflows with certain routings and plugs. I can already get too much “digital artifact free” distortion. Something like that pulsar 8200 already sounded like it had too much distortion when boosting heavily while not being distorted enough if you get my drift. And don’t believe anyone who says big boosts aren’t realistic uses. I like cassette stuff. Big bass or treble shelf fed into something that eats bass or treble can sound extremely cool. Just like big wide bell like on a proportional eq into something that will saturate it off or saturated or clipped off compressor overshoots sounding big. The Sonnox transient shapers even encourage you to do this because it’s all built in.

OK.  Just trying to understand you as my experience is pretty different - both in terms of analog gear and in terms of the music we do.  Specifically if you can, what are those top selling and/or hyped on GS compressors that you really don't like?

Youtube started playing me this Audio Animals video about why they choose certain analog gear and he mentioned how if the UnFairchild costs 14k and makes that back in two months that it's worth its weight in gold. And he mentioned that they get at least two emails a day requesting to have tracks run through it. I'm guessing that the month mark may have been just a random timeframe he tossed out there, but I'm definitely curious what the general odds are to earn a return on investment for a piece. Later on in the video he mentions that hardware versions of stuff like these PA plugins are great enticements for producers who use the plugins. When I took a quick look at websites for studios near me, I don't see any of the latest and greatest gear listed. Or a lot of holy grail type stuff that people want to use. Seems like a lot of studios splurge at the beginning and don't continually add stuff. Where they really come up short is on marketing and branding. After viewing all those sites, I couldn't tell anyone much about their respective brands or why I'd want to choose them. Now plugin companies, they really excel at branding. Slate and Waves have such tremendous branding that they're probably household names even for people who don't do audio as a hobby or profession.

Oh yes, the power of compound interest!!

If I’d put every dollar I’ve ever spent on studio gear (hardware and software) into an extra pension fund (or better still a extra property) then I’d be so much better off financially than I am now!

But I’ve been lucky and I’ve done ok for myself anyway, so in my case I’ve been able to have a fun journey and not hate myself too much about the amount of money I’ve spent.

I also have the world’s most understanding wife …. Mrs hightenor is definitely a unicorn