Coil ca70 s plugin

I’ll Be interested to try it out.
I won’t be home for at least a month and a half so any shootout on my end will have to wait!

The sound demos sound pretty good.

Well, people do pass mixes through the Coils (I don’t personally) so I guess an emulation would be yet another flavour of digital saturation.

The magic of the CA-70 for me personally is dialling in the gain - o/p relationship and the negative feedback and driving your favourite ribbon and LDC mics.

Then hitting a tube comp and then hitting your A/D.

That’s something very different to essentially a saturation plugin post recording ime.

When processing outboard via the Line in I have been shaping the low end before the CA70S with the Audio Merge King Tubby Big Knob HPF inductor filter. Also have tried the Westfinga 9069 inductor (which has a resonance pot). Both are a pretty steep 3rd order so like 70 hz (maybe 150) is perfect. So to me the HPF function in a CA70S plugin makes lots of sense. Even after the output stage since then I could get jiggy with that +4 Low like you describe.


But how do you use the low pass filter (and what do you set it to)? Is it to counteract extra sizzle when the neg FB knob is fully CCW off?

I’m not going to complain about an extra feature being there, but I can’t ever imagine needing to use a low pass filter with the CA-70 😂. It’s like the king of smooth top end, everything comes out sounding warmer.

Well it’s just a bunch of 0’s and 1’s.

Developers can’t resist adding more features (relevant or not!)

Aside from the “jumping on the band wagon element”
how many more versions of “digital” hair does a plugin folder need!

I can actually see this plugin helping Coil Audio sales (not that I think they need any help!)

Buy this and you might find yourself thinking ….

“wow if I had a real one I could actually pre-amplify a microphone” …. how crazy would that be

I think the feature question we’re all asking ourselves is…

“Will it have onboard p48?”

Is the phase switching doing something weird for anyone else? I forgot to mention it, I flipped it quickly yesterday and there was a weird, audible difference. Something was off, but wouln’t have time to mess with it again for a while.

I'm curious how the plug-in might deliver the interactivity of CA70S + Mic. From what I understand Coil indicated a specific design choice of really low input impedance to achieve maximum power transfer. Rather than the more (modern) typical maximum voltage transfer that would happen with a Pre that has a high input Z (like some Neve or AEA Pres do).

Actually, from my rudimentary understanding the exceptionally low input impedance on the CA70S would favor current transfer and result in a power mismatch for mics that have relatively high output impedances (my SA87T is 200 ohm output Z for example). And with the CA70S input transfo being (it looks like from the label) 1:400 (150:60000, similar to a Triad A10-J or AA12-J not center tapped) that is a wicked low reflected impedance to the mic. 

Anywho, I'll bet we find that the plug-in can do pretty good at the saturation and perhaps negative feedback aspects but is not going to allow for the extreme interactivity of the circuit and Mic. So far trying a few different Mics withe CA-70S the interactivity is really special. 

Also... is a CA286S pluggo coming soon? Hopefully so! Curious how they might differ.



Interesting. I note a pretty sizeable difference for the HW CA70S polarity switch with piano, synth and vocals but less so for driven guitar off a cabinet or percussion. I tried to peek at the waveforms and kinda convinced myself that the keys and vocals were less symmetrical and that might account for the differenc when flicking the polarity switch (not sure technically, but maybe the crappy acoustics here also contribute to asymmetry). After noting this I try to use the CA70S polarity switch like a responsiveness factor kinda thing cause boomy low end stuff seems to have more asymmetry. But not sure how that translates to the plugin.

Not true.  It's a standard unloaded tube grid approach, the Ω spec is the source Z, the preamp is much higher Ω.  An original Gates SA-70 with the UTC transformers measures well over 5KΩ mid-band.  You'd have to wind a kind of crappy input transformer to force extra low input Ω with a circuit like this.  

You need an avatar. I’ve got one in mind if you want me to do it.

I find the CA70 design discussion to be fascinating. Whatever it's doing, it's doing very well to my ear. Never have I heard a tone as sweet, pure and "sounds like a record" as my Stager SR3 directly into the Coil preamp. Lately I have been doing Stager SR3 into CA-286 into CA-70 line in for my vocals. What a tone. No plugin can emulate that portion since by the time its in the computer its already too late... the damage has already been done by inferior mic preamps if real Coil Audio tone is what you are seeking. Really takes the phrase "takes EQ well" to a whole new level. Extreme boosts on my LilFreq EQ have never sounded better. It must be something about those transformers after reading all the drama that went into making sure the new supplier was up to snuff. Glad they took care of it because I can't imagine life without my Coils.