With the sound of an analogue recording and mixing chain being a function of so many different elements, can it be achieved by using a single plugin across the mix? We check out one new option.
Now that recorded audio is free from so many of the once-common technical flaws of old, the modern engineer is free to bask in the glow of the ‘perfect’ audio experience. That said, (perhaps to the confusion of those who don’t miss hiss and distortion) many others turn to an aesthetic for their recordings that uses imperfection to its advantage. There are elements of band-restricted or saturated audio that the ear finds intrinsically good to listen to, and for some, using analogue flavoured techniques or processing gets their music to how they want it to sound.
Flavours Of Crunch
The timeline of analogue audio saw two major technologies emerge in the last century, with early valve (tube) technology giving way to solid state devices. Since the eventual digital revolution, developers of audio software products have been offering ways to get back to the halcyon days of analogue before the dust had a chance to settle on the hardware originals. At least two respected brands even offer emulations of late analogue consoles whose performance arguably surpassed that of some early DSP mixers by an audible margin.
Mastertones The Palette
Of the many audio plugins offering a taste of the analogue experience, The Palette is the latest in a line of processors from Mastertones designed to sit across your mix. Perhaps alluding to the three flavours of analogue mentioned earlier (valve, transistor, and super-clean solid state), the plugin is centred around a novel triangular balance control that lets users choose and/or mix between them. A mix control is provided, although The Palette’s suitably subtle character might mean users will want to try it at 100% first to get acquainted with its sound. Tech specs:
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Analogue-flavoured buss processor
Supports mono, stereo and multichannel formats, including quad, 5.0, 5.1, 7.0, 7.1, and 7.1.4. Dolby Atmos.
Up to 96kHz session support with internal computational sampling rate of 192kHz. Oversampling is set by default.
The Easiest Way To An Analogue Sound?
Below are audio examples taken with settings from the latter part of the video, where the front end of The Palette is pushed to get more noticeable results.
What constitutes the ‘analogue sound’ will mean different things to different people. Bringing together all of the elements that constitute that sound is no mean feat, so the engineer must take a layered approach that considers the signal path from end-to-end. This could be a hybrid approach with an ‘imperfect’ analogue front end augmented by vintage style processing in the box, and in that context, ‘magic bullet’ processors have their place when used with care. Of those, The Palette offers a subtle take on this kind of tool with a simple control set that makes it easy to experiment, yet difficult to go too far.