As Cycling '74 discontinued development of Pluggo back in May 2009, Tritone Digital has moved on and is now releasing fully custom-coded native RTAS, VST and AU plug-ins for Mac OS X. First up is version 2.0 of the classic EQ ValveTone '62 and a new plug-in, ClassicTone-PEV. More natively re-coded plug-ins are coming soon.

ClassicTone-PEV, $85, is modeled after a unique vintage EQ that was made by a German audio company famous for its microphones. The PEV was the first EQ ever made by this company and was used for vinyl mastering.

The original PEV featured a totally passive and discrete design with transformer balanced inputs and outputs and extremely high quality inductors for each band.

The original PEV featured bass and treble bands with both boost and cut abilities. The middle "presence" band had a selectable center frequency but was boost only. TriTone Digital has implemented this middle band as both boost and cut.

The curve and turnover or center frequency of each band was designed so that it changed in a very musical way as the gain was increased or reduced.

Features:

• Bass: Adjusts the gain for the bass band between -15 db and +12 dB. The bass band was designed to be adaptive: at higher boosts or cuts the turnover-frequency moves upwards towards the midrange and the slope changes to produce a more powerful, broad effect. At the upper range of cutting the slope changes from that of a shelving EQ towards that of a high-pass filter. This EQ has been modeled exactly. The 0 dB gain setting still provides the natural EQ color as the signal still passes through an inductor and transformer-rich signal path.
• Mid: Adjusts the gain for the middle "presence" band between -8 db and +8 dB. The original PEV units only allowed mid boost, our plugin allows both boost and cut. The available center frequencies for the presence band are 700 Hz, 1 kHz, 1.4 kHz, 2 kHz, 2.8 kHz, 4 kHz and 5.6 kHz. The middle-band was designed to have an adaptive Q: the boost or cut is quite broad at lower gain settings and narrows as more boost or cut is applied. This adaptive effect is more pronounced with the higher frequency settings.
• Treble: Adjusts the gain for the treble band between -15 db and +12 dB. The treble band was also designed to be adaptive: at higher boosts or cuts the turnover-frequency moves down towards the midrange and the slope changes to produce a more powerful, broad effect. At the upper range of cutting the slope changes from that of a shelving EQ towards that of an extremely unobtrusive low-pass filter.

Changes in ValveTone '62 for Mac Version 2.0:

• Pluggo no longer required.
• 40% less CPU usage.
• Load x3 faster.
• XML preset export/import added.
• A/B comparison of settings added.
• Option-click to reset parameters to default.
• Lower latency (42 samples).
• RTAS plugin recall does not work between version 2.0 and earlier versions.
• Mac only.

ValveTone '62 is available now for Mac OS X priced at $85. Owners of the original ValveTone '62 will receive a code in their email this which will allow them to purchase the new version for the upgrade price of $25.