beautypill wrote:You are talking to a man who legally owns (or has tried) nearly every legitimate plug-in in the world*, including the dreaded Waves Mercury bundle.
I know what I'm talking about.
Waves is waaaaay over-rated in the sound quality field. They have been lazy and obsessed with money, not innovation. Market dominance does not mean better quality.
I completely agree. Many of their most famous plugins have been around for 10 years or more with no alterations other than (apparently) keeping them compatible with new systems. That's generally done in the shell, anyway, not the actual plugin. I still like many of those, but I completely agree that they're getting long in the tooth.
beautypill wrote:
As a company Waves are no longer on the cutting edge.
The single exception is the API package, which I admitted earlier on this thread is truly extraordinary.
I'm serious about this: Waves is not the ruling class anymore. That stopped being the case many years ago.
I don't really know what Waves does as a company. I know they're into more than just plugins. Their maxxbass algorithms are sold to many companies for use in devices like Bose speakers, small handheld players and boomboxes to make them sound bigger than they really are. Even movies and broadcast, use it. But I don't think it qualifies as cutting edge in any sense.
That said, I have to say that the L3 limiter series (
L3 Ultramaximizer,
L3 MultiMaximizer,
LL3 Ultra and Multi, and the
L3-16-Band, etc) is VERY exciting, and possibly cutting edge. It's so different that it's very difficult to talk about it to anyone who hasn't
mastered it. By that, I mean that using it is not enough. Until you're actually sure of what you're doing, how it works, and one knows how to manipulate it for one's own ends, then one really is unlikely to understand this plugin. It's not at all like "five one-band limiters," such as the MOTU Masterworks Limiter which gives you 3 bands. It works on a principle of 1 limiter with 5 bands of
priority that are EQ'd, mixed and summed before limiting. It is phase coherent, and the possibilities are not obvious until you understand its workings.
Sorry to go off on that tangent, but I'm just demonstrating that the L3 is not merely a rehash of previous successes, but a whole new approach to limiting as far as I can tell. If there are other limiters working under the priority/summation/limiting principle, I'm not aware of them.
That has been an outgrowth of the old
C4 processor (which was amazing), its successor -- the
LinearPhase MultiBand Processor, and the
L2 Limiter-- all combined into one, but with a different method of summation: by
percentage priority rather than only range, threshold, gain, and so forth. To me, that's pretty cutting edge.
beautypill wrote:
You just have to open your eyes to the smarter, hipper, more dedicated competition. They're smaller companies... it's kind of like the worldwide
Microbrewphenomenon that started to blossom about fifteen years ago, where the smaller companies produce higher quality beer because of devoting more love and attention to the product.
In addition to better sound quality (remember: most plug-in makers are obsessives), the business practices of these smaller companies is much more respectful to the user. They treat you like a human being because they are. This is extremely important. Just as important as sound quality, in some cases.
There's lots of innovation going on these days that has nothing to do with the Waves behemoth.
Once again, I agree here. I'm SOOO relieved to see the "microbrew" plugins popping up left and right, though it's not necessarily good that they have adopted boutique pricing as well. There's something to be said for profit through bulk, rather than trying to squeeze everything possible out of a handful of customers.
I'd love to be done with Waves, but the L3 postponed my departure date.
Seriously, that's one piece of work. I could take that, the Mastering Bundle, and the Stereo Separation plugins (S1, etc.) and leave the rest, I think, though I use quite a few more than that. Altiverb will always be my reverb, as long as Audio Ease keeps it current. My meters are Elemental Audio (now Roger Nichols), EQ is largely the MOTU Masterworks, and I think I'll be using the MOTU compressor in DP6. So, gradually my plugin stable is breaking off chunks of the Waves domain and reducing it to just a few horses in the barn. That's what I want.
Shooshie
