A.O.M.

As a huge fan of the A.O.M. plugins, especially the Limiter, I was very happy to discover a new plugin from them, and downloaded it ASAP.

The first look of tranQuilizr gives you a good feeling as the graphics are very clean and nice, with an excellent coloring of bands and stylish overall looks, much better then previous plugins by A.O.M. and mingles with the top used EQs out there, in the cause of appearance. one thing missing could be a visual presentation of the incoming and out going wave, like many other good ones have and something i think many of us love.

Using the tranQuilizr is as smooth as the looks, you get your way around fast, and soon discover that a lot of attention to other high quality EQs in means of usability have been taken notice of, with ctrl, shift, left and right click combinations to do work fast and easy, A.O.M also made a little helper in the top to get quick view of the shortcuts, which is very helpful. Everything is moving and changing in a pleasant pace, making extreme fine tuning a bliss.

Feature wise the EQ have a lot of gadgets that are both useful and genius, like band m/s mode, type of EQ, band Solo, very low to very high slopes on cuts and master monitor modes with inverter etc. It is just an EQ, but the team behind this managed to do little extra here, which at this point in time is very essential in my opinion. The channel modes on bands and master and the selection of all this spectrum madness really is the most genius part of the features.

Yes, at last, the quality, it's amazing, it's.. out of words. I have never heard a better sound coming out of an EQ than this monster! I don't know how they did it, but it feels like magic? I want to be constructive and professional about his, but? it is just amazing.

On the easy quality steps, the sound is still clean and musical enough for your all around tasks, and on the top quality setting the sound is perfect for mastering, and i really mean perfect as in perfect top notch. This is one of those plug it in and make my music sound great kinda plugins.

The price is more than fair, as it is an EQ you can use everywhere, and if it only just was a mastering plugin, the price would still be fair and a must buy.

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Wave Shredder is a perfect naming solution for this little thing. The easiest thing to do with it is thinking that it's a distortion unit, it really is not, it is a wave shredding device, which mean, that the sound gets destroyed, digital and harsh. Sound degrading is not a new thing either, but Wave Shredder has a sound of it's own and sticks out in the crowd.

You can use it to make weird sounding effects, dis-tonal noises or to give a slight effect on few things here and there, just to get some sparks around them. You don't use it to get the super distorted 303 sound or plug it onto your guitar track thinking, that this is the perfect effect on your power chord, if you do it anyway, you end up with a new and fresh artistic sound instead.

While it is a shredding device, and it is suppose to making a wave ugly and degraded, it actually does it with a high amount of clearity, and that maybe the point of making the plug-in, as the sound turns in character instead of just sounding degraded, while maintaining quality.

It's best suited for experimental genres, psy trance, 8 bit, electro and so on, as it can really turn a sound up side down. The shredding effect gives a bass or a lead a very unique sound, so it is worth buying, but only because it is so very cheap.

The value for money is high, but not in the top, as there are many free plug-ins that comes close to this baby. The things that gives Wave Shredder the "Worth the money" stamp is, that it can degrade while it is disturbing, and it has many ways of destroying sounds, into sweet noise.Read Review

The Invisible Limiter is a brick wall limiter, that took me by surprise some cold day not so long ago. I used the old free version which already then was great, but the latest 1.3 version (Commercial version) has some extra features, which takes it to dimensions you usually pay 10 or maybe 50 times more money for.

It has automatic attack and release times, which i first found annoying by the looks of it, but it´s really not needed to tweak the times with this plug-in, as it´s timing optimization is doing a great job by it´s own.

The GUI is good, but not the fastest in the field. It´s VU meters are a bit laggy and non-responsive, and it has a RSS feed thing in the top right corner, which causes me a lot of trouble. Besides that, it´s easy to use, easy to find the few controls it has and easy to make things sound great fast.

The best feature about this plug-in must be the M/S channel Mode, i totally love the sound of tightly compressed mono and stereo, it really glues it all together without the muddy sound easy to get from other software. Sounds really stand out but never left alone. Combine MS mode with 16 x Oversampling, pump up the input gain, and you are on.

It also have the ability to keep the overshoot instead of removing it, and it can run in low latency mode and normal mode, as it is a limiter perfect for mastering, i find these features a bit pointless, but well, nice to have i guess.

Genre wise it fits for almost all styles, because it does not have a sound for itself, it just get the volume high, without you noticing it. They say that it´s transparent and invisible, and i must agree with A.O.M.

Well it is very easy to use in the first place, but it´s also very easy to get help on-line, and the support team are fast and well formulated. As mentioned, i had a weird problem with the RSS feed, and mailed A.O.M. about this, few hours later they responded, that they also could reproduce the bug, and that they are working hard to get it fixed. And it is fixed!

Presets? we don't neeed, presests! Seriously, it's not needed, as it is so easy to operate, and that it has no sound of it's own.

Quality wise it´s top notch, really, i have no idea where this plug-in came from, oh yeah Japan. They really did some magic, and the price is ridiculously low.

Overall i love this plug-in, i can't understand how it's possible to produce such an excellent piece of software, and i hate to rate some of the fields bad because it deserves a clean 10 in the overall. My arms and hands will never come down again, just so full of joy over this mystical Japanese ninja, stealthy sliding in the night, making everything sound louder and better.Read Review

Stereo enhancers or imagers are old news, all have them some where in some format by some brand and so on. A.O.M made a plug in, that does what you expect and nothing else, it can widen or narrow your signal, but it does not do in it the way you are use to. When Stereo Imager D is widening for example, it uses REAL stereo to do it, and not the fake mono inverted thing we are used to by others, it's the real stereo signal, aka the source without mono, this means, that sounds you hear in the left channel still sit in the left, and still no mono signal. It's in my hornest opinion the best imager i have used, because it is doing what you except an imager to do, and it does it flawless.

It sounds great and clean, no degrading, no extra noise or saturation, just clean controllable stereo and mono.

Only two knobs and two buttons are needed to control. center gain, side gain as the two knobs are called, i guess you can imagine what they do. Auto gain is the first button, it can, as the name says it, auto gain the signals, so they max out the volume. The last buttons is bypass which, like the name of the button, bypasses the whole plug-in.

When i bought this, just because i loved they're limiter, i did not expect anything, but when i heard a REAL STEREO signal without the mono inside, i was blown away, it is actually widening, and not just adding fake stereo to the source, like most other imagers do. Get it to believe it.Read Review