Desk is a plugin to turn your DAW into a real mixing desk. It goes on every channel, every buss, every output - everywhere - and turns digital math into very clean console sound. +18db headroom. Anti-aliased since 2.0.

How and why it works (according to Airwindows)

Very few things in real life, whether acoustic or electrical, are really mathematically perfect. Air compresses, circuits distort, everything becomes nonlinear- yet DAWs, even ones as nice as Logic, remain entirely linear. That's great to build on, but it compels people to throw all sorts of tape emulations etc. at the problem.

Desk takes both signal level and slew rate and makes them nonlinear. You could say it warps the reality of your DAW! But unlike tape and distortion effects, Desk is not designed to distort at 0 db. Its headroom is a solid 18 db or so above zero, like a real console- and it isn't meant to sound great when run into blatant distortion, any more than real consoles do. (Hit a buss hard if you really want the sound of stressed hardware.)

Instead, Desk builds on the lessons learned by the popular freebie Channel, setting up a non-linearity that is super gentle. If you don't have really good monitoring, you might not hear any effect from just one copy of Desk in the signal path- nor should you- this isn't about dirt, it's about clarity and reality.

Bear in mind, however, that there was a successor to Desk - Console, and if you have neither, you should be looking at that first. When Console came out, all Desk users got it as an update - that's how much Console does what I meant to do with Desk in the first place. I would've retired Desk, but there were people really getting their sound using it in conjunction with BussColors, and the thing about Console is it tries to touch the sound even less than Desk does while expanding the soundfield - so there can still be use for Desk, for instance to place on auxes to make them sound like you're running through more wire, or to darken particular channels in a special way. It might also see use with audiophiles. Console can't be used by audiophiles because it cannot be run in mastering or playback- you have to have access to all the tracks to make it work properly.

Desk does not supply its own safety limiter or clipper - again, its headroom is something like 18 db over DAW output clipping (thanks to Logic's floating point busses). If you need to hit the output buss in such a way that it overdrives, you can use ShortBuss for a fatter sound (the output should place Desk before ShortBuss) or 3DClip for a cleaner, harder sound - or indeed any other saturation or limiter plugin you like. Bear in mind that ShortBuss and 3DClip don't apply the slew non-linearity that Desk applies, so you still need a Desk instance in there first to get the full effect.

Desk comes with three versions:

1. The original Desk, which is the lowest CPU hit (still lots more than Console though).
2. TransDesk which adds a particular sort of transistory zing that goes well with BussColors Rock.
3. TubeDesk which is actually a bit airier and behaves like it's got a tube power supply with a certain amount of 'rectifier sag'.

The 2.0 version added a new kind of anti-aliasing which is uniquely suited to Desk: I worked out a way to run anti-aliasing ONLY on the distortion parts of the sound and leave the clear original part of the signal totally untouched. With Desk, that's almost everything - so the saturation/slew Desk produces is already a tiny, tiny amount of beneficial 'math warping'. The anti-aliasing takes only that warping, and alters it in such a way as to give stronger tone and deeper soundstage, and combines that with the untouched clean signal, giving the benefits of anti-aliased overdrive with a clean component that is not run through conversions.