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

[pekbro]

A nice Eq, certainly worth $19 bucks. That is, assuming you can get around
Waves Central and the wonky Waveshell. Literally took me an hour to get it
working for no particular reason, beyond the shell refusing to refresh its
contents properly. The first waves plugin I've bought in a few years actually,
much to my surprise.

-Cheers

[MFXxx]

Got to be honest at £16 its worth the money for me to explore and if not shelve it. Great price and waves are just as good as any in my book.

[do_androids_dream]

Well it's about time they released a dynamic eq!! It's the one hole in the Waves line up (C1 has some functionality similar). Demo'ing this evening.

[jens]

I doubt that the Waves F6 has anything that TDR Nova GE doesn't have.

Your doubts are unrelated to reality though.

In reality the F6 features zero-latency and Mid/Side per band while Nova GE does not.


Re "buzzwords": WTF??? They simply list the features - is there some new etiquette that considers this bad form or what?

All dynamic EQs ere dynamic EQs and all those that aren't (=the great majority of all the EQs out there) aren't and I have no idea how else they are supposed to name that feature - and the same goes for Mid/Side... so seriously: what the f**k?

[Obsolete236871]

Your doubts are unrelated to reality though.
In reality the F6 features zero-latency and Mid/Side per band while Nova GE does not.

Thanks for bringing me back into reality, Jens.

Nova GE has many features that the Waves F6 doesn't have. Check the smart actions for example. Nova GE also does have Mid/Side (not per channel though). If Waves F6 is zero latency (= low latency, there is no such thing as "zero latency"), then I guess it's doesn't have the same pristine audio processing quality that Nova GE offers.

[DJ Warmonger]

How does this compare to Izotope? Ozone and Trash have similiar functionality.

[3ee]

wow, the whole "waves central" waveshells and whatnot = pieces of c%@P ! (I promise I won't consider Waves anymore until they get things right!)

added: about F6: if you don't have a decent dynamic eq then this is worth considering (if you want to tolerate the whole Waves system which I for one I'm pretty sick of!!!!)

0 latency, CPU usage very low (If Pro-MB would take 7% on my system, f6 would take 6%)
odd mouse sensitivity IMO, no spectrum analyzer.. sound quality: "good enough" to work with

[UltimateOutsider]

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)

Yeah, even though the Waves thing is super cheap right now, this thread caused me to rediscover GlissEQ last night. That thing is a power house, with the routable spectrum analyzer and everything.

GlissEQ does not seem to have any sidechain functionality, though, which is a nice feature in F6.

[Compyfox]

First and foremost - deep breath, jens. Helps a lot.

The thing that is the biggest buzzword here, is "Floating Band", Dynamic EQ and M/S is just the tip of the iceberg. While this EQ is in fact supposed to be a Dynamic EQ, that's not the problem. But you have to admit that one of the "selling buzzwords" these days is M/S. If a tool these days is not M/S capable, it's considered crap shite - or am I wrong on this?

So if there is a WTF moment, it is this.

In reality the F6 features zero-latency and Mid/Side per band while Nova GE does not.

Technically, correct. Nova GE does not have "zero-latency", but minimum latency. Considering the workpower behind the engine, no surprise.

In fact:

NOVA GE offers three different quality modes:
Eco: Economic mode, with an internal bandwidth ~100kHz
Precise: Default quality, with an internal bandwidth ~200kHz
Insane: Very high quality, with an internal bandwidth ~400kHz

And regarding mid-side:

Hint: Sum, Diff, Left and Right modes allow simultaneous and fully independent processing of each channel by simply adding multiple instance of NOVA in series and using either exclusive processing mode. The CPU load of two instances each processing Left/Right independently will not be much higher that the CPU load of a single instance operating in Stereo mode

It's the same way Melda Production does this.

GlissEQ does not seem to have any sidechain functionality, though, which is a nice feature in F6.

For the record, NOVA GE has external sidechain capabilities as well. If(!!!) you really need that.

[MogwaiBoy]

Wait a minute - no analyzer? That's an oversight.

[ghettosynth]

Wait a minute - no analyzer? That's an oversight.

Yep! I don't use paragraphics without them, at all. I have Flux's EQ and some people love it, but, nope, no analyzer, it never gets used.

[Compyfox]

Yes and no.


A frequency analyzer would definitely help you find/fix issues faster.
The lack of a frequency analyzer however forces you to listen more closely and not just trust your eyes.


However, the way this thing is constructed (like a lot of node-type EQ's from other companies), I am also surprised that no frequency analyzer runs in the background. Guess this clears the plugin price... *cough*

No, in all seriousness though - from the presentation videos, I think the focus of this design was for something else. To me, this looks like as if the UI was especially designed for "digital mixing consoles" (think Yamaha, DiGiCo, AVID Venue), and to cut the CPU usage of these devices, the FFT was dropped, the overall look simplified, etc.


And in this case, also considering that it's "Sound-Grid" compatible, not to mention that Sound-Grid recently got an announcement for an integration card system for both the Behringer X32 and MIDAS M32... I think this is why this plugin looks like it looks.

[andrei.tuduran]

From Waves website :

"Q: Amazing EQ to be honest did the job beautifully, however there is a question, are there any plans on adding spectrum analyzer?

Waves Audio 05/29/17
A: Hi Perry.

An analyzer is usually a very CPU-heavy component. One of our goals with the F6 was to create a plugin that you can open many instances of, without overloading the CPU. We’ve decided to keep the F6 as light as possible so you can have a high plugin count.

(Note that in SoundGrid systems you can turn off the analyzer only visually – the process must continue to run in the background in order to avoid audio drops or overload when the analyzer is turned back on. This is why we didn’t include an analyzer that can be turned on and off, but rather chose to exclude the analyzer altogether.) "

[sonicpowa]

Great plugin. But they have different component shell versions so why not also F6 +analyzer?

[jens]

In reality the F6 features zero-latency and Mid/Side per band while Nova GE does not.

Technically, correct. Nova GE does not have "zero-latency", but minimum latency. Considering the workpower behind the engine, no surprise.

In fact:

NOVA GE offers three different quality modes:
Eco: Economic mode, with an internal bandwidth ~100kHz
Precise: Default quality, with an internal bandwidth ~200kHz
Insane: Very high quality, with an internal bandwidth ~400kHz

You quoted the wrong bit of the Manual (I have no idea what you were trying to prove or show with that).


Here's the right part of the manual:

Latency 44.1/48k: 187 samples
Latency 88.2/96k: 31 samples
Latency 176.4/192k: 0 samples

So yes, @44,1k/48k it's a whopping 187 samples - is that your idea of "minimum"?

And regarding mid-side:

Hint: Sum, Diff, Left and Right modes allow simultaneous and fully independent processing of each channel by simply adding multiple instance of NOVA in series and using either exclusive processing mode. The CPU load of two instances each processing Left/Right independently will not be much higher that the CPU load of a single instance operating in Stereo mode

It's the same way Melda Production does this.

Please read again!

I wrote "per band" - and no, also here Nova isn't even close, GE or not.