The new Waves F6 Floating Band Dynamic EQ - Your opinion and experience

[MogwaiBoy]

Any comments on the sound quality?

+1

Wondering about aliasing, being the pedantic dork I am.

[UltimateOutsider]

Would like to hear how it stacks up against Voxengo's GlissEQ, which has a very comparable feature set (including M/S processing).

The Waves plug sure has a handsome UI, but not sure I can justify the purchase yet given I already have GlissEQ- although F6 is only $29 USD right now... damn it.

[Compyfox]

"Dynamic EQ" and "mid/side" are not buzzwords, they are terms.

I take the word "terms" (thesaurus: requirements) with a gigantic grain of salt. The way this is written on the WAVES page, is pure buzz to sell something "outstanding", which in reality isn't. These days, if it doesn't come with "Mid/Side" features, or "dynamic handling of frequency bands", it's considered "bad / unusable".

Whatever floats your boat.

For the band thing there is no one standard term, that's why different descriptive roundabout words get used.

Keep learning!

That is absolute NONSENSE and the very reason why meetups like at the AES Convention exist.

The "standard term" for full parametric EQ's is exactly that!

Meaning: you have a gain control, a frequency selection and a Q/bandwidth setting - making it (wait for it) "full parametric".

"Floating Band" is an interesting name. But technically it's a made up... "term"... just like hot/warm/cold/phat/fluffy(!!!!)/ripping/dark/<insert subjective feeling here>

"Free form" is the description for the capability to "paint-your-own-filter-courve" btw...


So if you (or anyone else up until this point) didn't get it - my initial post was sarcasm.

20 bucks more - but no buzzwords.

No need to cry - for what you invest, you do support an excellent developer team (!) that doesn't live off of made-up buzzwords or crazy descriptions. This way, you don't back a developer that is more than often throwing out shovel-ware, not to mention that this particular company does sales with up to 80% price drops ever so often - plus the yearly WUP thing.

But to each their own.
So many tools to choose from these days. Do the right thing, speak with your wallet.

If the current offerings are still too expensive for some people out there (which I know that they exist), there is still vladg Nova-67P (5+2 bands) and TDL NOVA (4+2 bands). Both freeware and they cover the very, very same topic.

Would like to hear how it stacks up against [url=<span class="skimlinks-unlinked">http://www.voxengo.com/product/glisseq</span>/]Voxengo's GlissEQ[/url], which has a very comparable feature set (including M/S processing).

The Waves plug sure has a handsome UI, but not sure I can justify the purchase yet given I already have GlissEQ- although F6 is only $29 USD right now... damn it.

Then two options for you:
1) demo the Waves plugin and find out
2) ignore the Waves plugin as you're already covered.

Especially since you're having up to 32 parametric filter bands with Voxengo - something that all other mentioned EQ's so far didn't have (MDynamic EQ is 5+2 bands, MAutoDynamicEQ is 7+2 bands, Nova-67P is 5+2 bands, TDL NOVA free is 4+2 bands, TDL NOVA GE is 6+2 bands, ToneBoosters Fix is 6 bands, HOFA IQ-EQ has 6 bands, etc)

[MogwaiBoy]

"Floating" just means not fixed, doesn't it? Nothing out of the ordinary. You would expect that in this kind of plugin.

[pheeleep]

Seems very similar to the waves C6...

[nicksohn]

Flx rocks.

[Andy Gone]

"Floating" just means not fixed, doesn't it? Nothing out of the ordinary. You would expect that in this kind of plugin.

"Floating" means any band can have any frequency (band N#3 can be below band #2 for example), unlike usual multiband design, where band #2 is always above band #3, etc.

Still, nothing out of the ordinary. They use this word just to explain which if the two possible designs it is.

[Obsolete236871]

I doubt that the Waves F6 has anything that TDR Nova GE doesn't have. TDR Nova GE with it's advanced features, such as the smart actions and it's very sophisticated DSP is probably even superior.

But for those that don't have a full fledged dynamic EQ yet, the price of $29 for the Waves F6 sure must be tempting.

[Compyfox]

"Floating" just means not fixed, doesn't it? Nothing out of the ordinary. You would expect that in this kind of plugin.

Technically, yes.

However, I consider "floating" as something else in this case, not "floating" as in "EQ band can be at any position" (which modern day EQ's do these days, and a lot of them have a "sort by frequency" function as well).


To me... "floating EQ's" could actually be something like this:
https://www.soundradix.com/products/surfer-eq/


And that's the thing with buzzwords that annoy me for years at this point... "somebody" in the marketing area made up a term in order to make their tool "unique" and "special", but in reality... it's nothing like that at all. Due to this, you see comments like "Instant purchase" and "you have no idea, STFU, this is the best since sliced and self-toasting bread" on various forums. Starting on page 1.

But again - whatever floats your boat.



...smoke and mirrors...

[LFO8]

I see they took some strong cues from iZotope with the GUI design for this EQ (not a bad thing IMO; looks clear and concise). I am surprised they offer it at such a low price.

[bmanic]

To me... "floating EQ's" could actually be something like this:
https://www.soundradix.com/products/surfer-eq/

That's actually what I thought it was at first. An EQ point that intelligently follows strong harmonics. That would indeed be "floating" to me.

So yeah, a perfect example of where the buzz word actually confused me. The word 'parametric' has been used since George Massenburg invented the bloody thing and is thus indeed the "official" word for the function.

[soulone82]

I think it´s a shame they didn´t include a spectrum analyzer. Preferably one that can display the sidechain spectrum as well.

This is something I love about the TDR Nova plugin. Makes finetuning your sidechain compression a breeze!

[zvenx]

Yes indeed, I also think a spectrum analyzer would be really nice to have here.
I usually reluctantly buy Waves stuff. Firstly I have to buy two of each to keep in my mac and pc system which I try to keep as compatible as possible, and one day you know WUP is going to bite you in the ass .


However I bought this one.

I don't have the Tokyo Dawn Records one, but I have mcdsp AE400 and 600 and I find the mcdsp too unnecessarily complicated to use, whereas this was a breeze to use which at this price made it an easier decision to buy.
In practice though, because of the solo mode, although I would find the spectrum analyzer nice, it isn't essential for me.

my two cents.
rsp

[Andrew Souter]

I think this is a nice direction from Waves. A solid, engineer's tool with a very nice, well-thought out, modern GUI design. I have not heard it, but they were one of the pioneers in multi band EQ/comp going way back to C4 and LinPhase MB, and L3/L316 etc almost 20 years ago now, so they know what they are doing and I am sure it sounds great. Nice to see them making these kind of engineer's tools again. I much prefer this direction from them instead of the "one button for a grammy" artist stuff. Nice work!

[Phorous]

Just picked it up... been looking for a cost effect dynamic EQ to fix some mixing issues with kick/bass mud... looks like the UI is well thought out as well. At $30 was an instabuy for me.