Make Believe MixHead Plugin

That and his Sontec is on sale, which I remember him saying that it would be unlikely to ever go on sale.

Looks cool. Sontec is cool but it advertises as a lot more than it is: a digital eq with slight distortion. The other make believe plugs are kinda stupid. Good Math lol

reductionist huh?

The company that did the DSP for the hardware unit, Spectral Design (now Cube-Tec), still works on plugins for Steinberg. It's too bad this isn't their plugin, they could have just ported over the original code. Although, I guess technically SPL owns that code so they would have had to license it.

It works nothing like the hardware. It is a prewarped bilineal transform old school digital eq with some sort of distortion on it. Either a circuit model or a polynomial wave shaping function. It has neither the phase response nor the distortion of the hardware. That is physically impossible for an eq that can be run at sample rates where the distortion and the filters alias.

It is known now how to make digital eqs that work like analog filters using trapezoidal integration so it is possible to model most analog eqs as ideal models of electric circuits. Metric Halo chose not to.

Also the filters alias on any eq run at 44.1 or 48 kHz. That’s what cramping is. No amount of pre warping the coefficients or post warping with a linear phase filter will make it perfect unlike simply running the eq at a higher sample rate.

Even for this, any distortion or non-linear response like dynamics means you need a second anti-alias filter. The signal is upsampled, it has mirror images, these are filtered out, the signal is processed, the signal is decimated and filtered back to the starting sample rate. If the processing is linear, you can skip one of the anti alias filters. This is what pro q3 natural phase mode, eq8, and Weiss eq mp do. Metric Halo Sontec instead warps the filter.

And the MH Sontec sounds good

MH. Stated inverse gain linking the controls not with in Pro Tools . They are working on a fix

the machine head plug weirdly caught my eye too. hoping we can eventually get to some discussion about that piece of software in this thread.

Pffft. It operates nothing like the hardware. This is a hyperpre pseudo-elliptical digital zapper with a hint of flux capacitor interference.

I dig the mixhead right in front of my Silver Bullet MK1.
It adds just a touch of the love butter....

There’s no way in hell it will be better than the modern tape plugs but it might be cool effect for sample based music. A lot of the older primitive distortion stuff has unintended uses like inflator being free gain on low passed guitars, vintage warmer as a fuzz, mcdsp analog channel’s tape head bump as a crazy resonant filter, etc. the gearspace crowd defending old and primitive digital things continues in many threads or even the guys there and random audiophiles online on hifi forums who criticize anti-alias filters or if apple knows how to write a single precision multiplier and if that effects the sound. This machine head was some primitive algorithm that ran on Motorola 56k chips, the same as pro tools tdm. Now we have tape plugs over sampling massively to emulate the effect of a bias tone on the signal like Satin and Chow Tape but this might be a cool “warmifier” in some way. The old metric halo distortion plugs are pretty cool but are just a bunch of cool colored wave shapers for messing stuff up and there’s really no need to use them over something hardware modeled that’s much more complex like even decapitator and Saturn or something cleaner like the various soft clippers and stuff like apulsoft apshaper that uses novel techniques to remove digital artifacts.

Quality of algorithms and sound quality went out the window years ago for popular music and supposedly professional equipment that’s unrepairable and often built with what as might as well be counterfeit parts with intentionally lofi features like clipped diodes and slew rate limiters. Gearslutz took a big nosedive a few years ago in apologizing for inferior mass market products and now you get warned or shot down by the shills for pointing it out. Some of this stuff is one step above a dull distorted Behringer jrc4580 circuit and is praised for features that were considered major sonic defects in earlier equipment.

Then you have stuff like the repackaged Metric Halo channel strip exactly the same as it was 20 years ago when it was worse than the Renaissance and Oxford line but people praised it who didn’t even have to use it for low latency monitor mixes because of celebrity producer endorsement. One of these same producers also caused the craze of multibanding guitar parts instead of automating an eq or using a dynamic eq after those came out and became outdated after dynamic eq (not just in the expensive and clean Weiss EQ1-DYN) came out (Voxengo gliss and hofa iq eq are ancient but dirtier) and was then made very popular by mcdsp aea400, vladg nova-67p, and waves f6 coming out in quick succession yet people still go to ancient posts and interviews and extol outdated advice that screws up the harmonics of the tone in a gross way whenever there’s a big resonance or proximity effect and I’m not even sure that producer uses multiband processing like that anymore based on his more recent, cleaner if more uniform productions. Yes the industry had more money then but the digital tools were far worse. There’s a ton of brown and dull recordings that went trough a ton of aliased processors and others that sound like white noise and ripped paper from different processors and the loudness war. Fart bass was popular for a period in parallel on kick and bass. Is this good? Not really because it dates like the recording and not just like older recording tech or old film stock. Instead of the art aiming to create a hyper reality, it falls off into the uncanny valley. The general public is clueless and many of them don’t even know which instruments or which or what a voice with natural vibrato sounds like or even singing without vibrato. Yet always the answer from the gear industry is a new special form of distortion that will make you sound like the past or hide poor recordings made with junky equipment that now the internet won’t even acknowledge is junky.

That's one thing about driven sounds that I have a philosophical dissonance with...Sometimes overdriving stuff just sounds like poor engineering to me. (I know it was on purpose) I'm just saying that my initial thought is "oh man that snare is overdriving the amp" instead of "oh man, that's a bold decision to choose to overdrive that snare." Just saying, there's a fine line between cool distortion and a mistake...