DC12 entries- a brief and incomplete review...

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I am basing this on my own opinion, as a studio engineer, of what is useful and what's not. Apologies in advance, I know this is difficult to do, I programmed a VST many years back.
Obviously I can't check out all the entries, I only checked the ones which would (A) run on my system and (B) would be interesting to me:

Radiojunk - I know what nebula is etc, but this is not useful. You can get better results from algorithmic approaches (several products I own do this) without half your CPU going missing.

Delay studio - Very useful as an SFX unit, would like to see more presets, and more 'general usage' presets rather than the 'effects' type ones present - though they are all both unique and flavoursome. Interesting, and due to the high CPU usage, probably not useful for mixing, but as a foley effect could be good.

Orchestral strings - I have heard many wavetable and synthetic strings, all of which sound better than this. I don't mind a cheap-sounding string, but the blurb the author wrote made it sound like it would warm the cockles of someone's heart. No, it didn't.

Boids - Interesting but hard to see an application for it. More of a graphical curio than a useful effect IMO.

Thrillseeker - I get the concept, but the result wasn't terribly useful. A standard EQ probably would have worked better in the context. CPU usage was fine.

PTeq1 - ALright sound, but two bands? Sorry, a mid band is kinda necessary. I get that it's emulating a particular thing, but that particular thing must suck. Terrible CPU usage.

Proximity - Useful, probably not in an actual mix as the non-eq components wouldn't necessarily be audible, but as an FX and foley tool could save a lot of time. 1 Thumb up.

Azurite - Extremely useful - I can see this having all kinds of mix applications. The knobs made sense, were useful in the context of the plugin, and the CPU usage was good. 2 thumbs way up.

Minisynths - Good. Fun. Different. Retro. Decent CPU usage. Not useful for all scenarios, but a good variety of one-tricks here. Good job. Two thumbs up.


Overall I'm a little disappointed with how lazy some people have been regarding CPU usage, as this is not a new issue, but something seems to have slipped the minds of some developers - that theirs is not the only plugin that's going to be used in a mix.

Cheers-
M@

ps. Not pussyfooting around does not mean I don't care. Hopefully a brutally honest review is going to be more inspiring or encouraging than something back-patting, though I would like to extend my gratitude towards anyone who gave the contest a shot - as I said, it is all hard work.

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metamorphosis wrote:

PTeq1 - ALright sound, but two bands? Sorry, a mid band is kinda necessary. I get that it's emulating a particular thing, but that particular thing must suck. Terrible CPU usage.

Overall I'm a little disappointed with how lazy some people have been regarding CPU usage, as this is not a new issue, but something seems to have slipped the minds of some developers - that theirs is not the only plugin that's going to be used in a mix.
Would love to see some SSE/SSE2 thrown at PTEq-1a, it is apparently "analog moddeled" which would explain the high CPU (probably enough exponentials to make you sea-sick). Hope they will keep on improving CPU-wise - on this one. Two bands are enough for me for alot of uses.

Some Synths might also be slightly misleading in the CPU department, HYDi for instance - on my i5 Quad - 1x instance = ~6% CPU. 10x instances = ~17% CPU.

Thanks for your honest review.

Andrew

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metamorphosis wrote: PTeq1 - ALright sound, but two bands? Sorry, a mid band is kinda necessary. I get that it's emulating a particular thing, but that particular thing must suck. Terrible CPU usage.
The CPU usage is high because the tube simulation is as close as a Spice simulation as it gets, so it models every single interaction between every components of the stage.
Solving a system of non-linear differential equations with implicit integration methods and exp/pow/log/sqrt functions is not something you can do without sacrificing some additional CPU cycles, let alone the internal oversampling that doubles (and more) the whole load at every oversampling step.
metamorphosis wrote: Overall I'm a little disappointed with how lazy some people have been regarding CPU usage, as this is not a new issue, but something seems to have slipped the minds of some developers - that theirs is not the only plugin that's going to be used in a mix.
Sorry, but I disagree. It is not fair to draw these kind of conclusions without knowing what's inside a plug-in.
If I were lazy, as you say, you could barely have an instance of two of PTEq-1a in an empty project. I can assure you that, as usual, I've spent a lot of time carefully optimizing the algorithms, trying to not touch the sound quality of the unoptimized version.
I've also added a switch to turn off the tube, if your machine (or project) can't handle it. You can switch it back on during rendering, if needed.
This plug-in was meant to feature the most advanced tube simulation I could offer and the fact that some users couldn't be able to use it with old machines was taken into account since the beginning.

In regards of the usefullness of a 2 band eq, I see where you're coming from, in fact this plug-in will be integrated with the MEQ-5 emulation (which features 3 additional variable bands) in the future. I just couldn't make it in time for the KVR DC12.

I hope I didn't come out as a dick, I just wanted to clarify those points.

Cheers and thanks for your opinions.

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metamorphosis wrote: Obviously I can't check out all the entries,
...but it would be nice if you would go on...I found your comments useful :)

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