So I took advantage of the recent sale to upgrade a handful of my Waves plugins and bundles to Horizon. I've never felt like I was missing anything with the old Waves plugins but I have wanted to pick up a bunch of stuff that's in Horizon and it was cheaper to upgrade than it was to buy those plugins outright, even at the $29 sale price+discounts.
That said, I've ended up with this endless sea of compressors, limiters, maximizers, and EQs that are littering up my plugin list. I've never really been a fan of the older Waves plugins, but, before I just tell Reaper and Cubase that they don't exist, I thought that I'd ask people that like them what they think are the standouts and where the overlap lies?
Making Sense of the endless list of Waves Lx,Cx, Qx ultra/multi whatever...
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 15517 posts since 13 Oct, 2009
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- KVRAF
- 2008 posts since 11 Aug, 2012 from omfr morf form romf frmo
Well, the Q-z stuff, you can get rid of all the lower z numbers unless you're on an ancient CPU. As well as the mono versions since Reaper doesn't do mono anyway. But if you have a competent multiband EQ like ReaEQ then why bother with any of them?
The Lx limiters... they have a specific "sound" to them, which may or may not be desirable. I like the L1 for 90s-style House and Techno. The L3-xx are multiband, which can be useful.
The C stuff, is annoying. One's a normal compressor, the other's a gate, and the other has sidechain. Why they can't integrate these into one plugin... anyway. You have ReaComp which does all this stuff. C4 is the multiband.
The Renaissance stuff is great. The H- stuff is great. H-Delay in particular, I only ditched in favor of EchoBoy, but it was my go-to for a while. CLA stuff is good. The V stuff are console emulations, good stuff.
PAZ Analyzer is useless. Something like a -80db floor.
Q-Clone can be useful due to the extant Q-Clone presets out there. Look up Henry Olonga's Q-Clone collection.
Trueverb is nothing special.
Maxxbass can be useful, and since it's patented, there's nothing else exactly like it. RBass uses a similar approach. But I think the patent expires this year so we'll see.
The Lx limiters... they have a specific "sound" to them, which may or may not be desirable. I like the L1 for 90s-style House and Techno. The L3-xx are multiband, which can be useful.
The C stuff, is annoying. One's a normal compressor, the other's a gate, and the other has sidechain. Why they can't integrate these into one plugin... anyway. You have ReaComp which does all this stuff. C4 is the multiband.
The Renaissance stuff is great. The H- stuff is great. H-Delay in particular, I only ditched in favor of EchoBoy, but it was my go-to for a while. CLA stuff is good. The V stuff are console emulations, good stuff.
PAZ Analyzer is useless. Something like a -80db floor.
Q-Clone can be useful due to the extant Q-Clone presets out there. Look up Henry Olonga's Q-Clone collection.
Trueverb is nothing special.
Maxxbass can be useful, and since it's patented, there's nothing else exactly like it. RBass uses a similar approach. But I think the patent expires this year so we'll see.
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simon.a.billington simon.a.billington https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=341278
- KVRAF
- 2375 posts since 12 Nov, 2014
Q generally refers to some of their equalisers, L refers to limiters and maximisers, C refers to compressors or multiband compressors and H refers to their Hybrid series which is pretty much born again analogue processing with a modern, hybrid approach to it. The Analog dial on the H-Delay and H-Compressor actually chooses emulation types and not noise unlike most of their other plugins.
The recently updated the Qx equaliser and the L1 limiter, I think it was. They are definitely worthy a look. The C4/C6 are multiband processors, check them out as well if you have them.
The recently updated the Qx equaliser and the L1 limiter, I think it was. They are definitely worthy a look. The C4/C6 are multiband processors, check them out as well if you have them.
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- KVRAF
- 2565 posts since 2 Jul, 2010
The C1 with sidechain is quite an interesting frequency-specific compressor, certainly a bit different from the Reaper compressor. All the C1x compressors can act as positive expanders and the gates (C1 and Audiotrack) can act as downward expanders. As the only REAPER expanders are JS tools with limited feedback, these are quite a useful addition. ReaGate is a really good gate but sometimes it's better to use an expander.
I prefer the older GUI for the Qx equalisers as it lets you do marquee selection of the parameters which can be handy; you can build a curve out of a few bands and then slide it around by selecting all frequencies and adjusting them. Then again, Ren EQ just has good curves to start with.
I added a few of the Q-EQs to my organised plugins; 1, 4, 6, and 10 I think. Use the ones that fill the space efficiently. Q1 I use in an emphasis/de-emphasis pair (Reaper FX chain with inverse-gain parameter linking).
I prefer the older GUI for the Qx equalisers as it lets you do marquee selection of the parameters which can be handy; you can build a curve out of a few bands and then slide it around by selecting all frequencies and adjusting them. Then again, Ren EQ just has good curves to start with.
I added a few of the Q-EQs to my organised plugins; 1, 4, 6, and 10 I think. Use the ones that fill the space efficiently. Q1 I use in an emphasis/de-emphasis pair (Reaper FX chain with inverse-gain parameter linking).
