OverTone FC-70 Review - Fairchild 670, Really?

[audiosabre]

I tried it out. As with the Pultec, I much prefer the IK version.

In this instance, the FC-70 was much snappier and more defined than the IK 670. More modern than vintage. The IK one rounds off the dynamics (feels more controlled), and has a lo-fi vibe; exactly what I'd expect from a vintage tube design.

[sorohanro]

Another one for you guys. Vocal

http://soundcloud.com/aiyn-zahev/vocal- ... ne/s-FHxGJ

"The owner of this track has not made this sound available for streaming in your location."
cool, thanks soundcloud.

[Tapehead]

Could be just a perception but I do find overtone plugins a tad harsher then IK…Though in all honesty in my style of music ( mostly acoustic) I'd avoid any plugin that is tagged as "vintage". I also, don't find the varietyofsound plugins as "acoustically enhancing". To my ears they make everything sound noticeably harder and harsher. As with everything, it is a matter of taste but even within Nebula libraries (and I own almost every one of them) there are only 2 or 3 programs that I find pleasing to my ears. They kind of through a nice shadow behind sound that makes it easier to listen to… it is like looking at the night fire, rather than staring directly at the midday sun…

[Aiynzahev]

Another one for you guys. Vocal

http://soundcloud.com/aiyn-zahev/vocal- ... ne/s-FHxGJ

"The owner of this track has not made this sound available for streaming in your location."
cool, thanks soundcloud.

Try it now, it might be a glitch

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[jancivil]

the only reason I would want an emulation of analog gear is for a flattering combo of artifacts.

the only reason I use the IKMM 670 is for a flattering rounding of highs/warmness. I don't quite get 'transparent/ 670 emu' personally.

[Tapehead]

Could be just a perception but I do find overtone plugins a tad harsher then IK…Though in all honesty in my style of music ( mostly acoustic) I'd avoid any plugin that is tagged as "vintage". I also, don't find the varietyofsound plugins as "acoustically enhancing". To my ears they make everything sound noticeably harder and harsher. As with everything, it is a matter of taste but even within Nebula libraries (and I own almost every one of them) there are only 2 or 3 programs that I find pleasing to my ears. They kind of through a nice shadow behind sound that makes it easier to listen to… it is like looking at the night fire, rather than staring directly at the midday sun…

very interesting..wow..!

The first question i have to ask, to understand at least your tastes, which three nebula programs are the ones you use? commercial is fine, as i'm going to purchase nebula regardless of being 32 bit in OSX and seeming dead-ish on development, as i simply read TOO often that it beats my algorithmic stuff, and to read it *that* often has made my curiosity overtake my desire not to spend money on it.

Edit - spelling only.

Before giving you my answer, I just want to make very clear that the following is not my recommendation to go and buy any library mentioned below; it's just something that massaged my ear senses just the right way, in my studio, in my style of productions and according to my sense of sonic esthetics.

So, here it goes - my number 1, top nebula developer is Tim (Cupwise). His libraries are highly creative and have clarity of sonic directions. Sound wise they are very obvious and you don't need to strap millions of them across all your channels in order to hear some "accumulative" magic. When I want some insane, upper mid mist/diffusion then I can just reach out for his cassette library, then place uber clean rayphlex (also his library) and combine them with a super clean EQ and there we go…pure velvet.

His latest library smooth609 is a very cuddly beast that truly helped me with my latest production. Few instances on vocal buses and acoustic instruments and boom…THAT sound just appeared out of nowhere. Right now I'm in a honeymoon state with this library so I should wait till the dust of newness settles then I can speak a bit more about it.
My second favorite developer is rhythminmind. His stuff is somewhat limited but nevertheless is very useful in my productions.

I used to use AITB EQ collections but nowadays I have better hardware options and as such didn't touch them in a very long time.

For me, the other main developers were a total waste of time and money. I especially detest console emulations …. Again, I should mention that my music is mostly acoustic and I don't use drums or percussions so your experience might be different.

I wish somebody would make a proper FairChild library. There some variations in the Cdsoundmaster collections but they sound like crap.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[bmanic]

Could be just a perception but I do find overtone plugins a tad harsher then IK…Though in all honesty in my style of music ( mostly acoustic) I'd avoid any plugin that is tagged as "vintage". I also, don't find the varietyofsound plugins as "acoustically enhancing". To my ears they make everything sound noticeably harder and harsher. As with everything, it is a matter of taste but even within Nebula libraries (and I own almost every one of them) there are only 2 or 3 programs that I find pleasing to my ears. They kind of through a nice shadow behind sound that makes it easier to listen to… it is like looking at the night fire, rather than staring directly at the midday sun…

Take care of how hard you are hitting the Nebula programs. They are very sensitive to the input signal strength (probably more so than the actual equipment being sampled). I frequently find myself going as low as -30dBFS for average levels and keeping peaks below -10dBFS or so..

<censored> sorry!

I haven't had the chance to do proper analysis of the FC70 but I did get warned that such a plugin should not exist in 2013 that it's rather old technology. I can not ignore the warning but after playing with it some 45 minutes today I still very much like the way it handles transients (softening them instead of accentuating them).

In the end it all comes down to "what fits best at this particular time". There is no magic plugin that turns everything to gold.. but I'm sure you all knew that already.

Another thing that has been nagging me as of late is the weird feeling that aliasing, even at ridiculously low levels, is a real problem still and is one of the HUGE benefits of doing as many things as possible in the analogue domain. It just enables us to work with a "less damaged" source and tremendously benefits at the final stage where everything is crushed to death. This might be a completely bogus feeling though because every time I do some serious ABX tests I fail to hear the difference but my slightly damaged brain still tells me that aliasing "adds up" and masks a lot of finer detail in the end product.. creating chaos in a non-harmonically relevant way.

Does it REALLY matter for the average listener though? Has a "bad production" ever really stopped me from listening to a kick-ass grooving track/song? Of course not. Should I stop worrying about all this and just make some damn music? Of course I should! Can I actually do that? I don't think so.. I'm programmed to be a gearslut.

Then again.. it's absolutely ridiculous how much cool stuff we can make on a simple laptop in 2013! I got this bulky, ugly piece of Chinese shit (no offence meant to anybody who is Chinese!) laptop case which is crammed full of the best technology on the planet. It's faster than our current studio machine! Yet I keep auditioning and testing single plugins in the hope of finding something magical.. sigh. Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn't be better off just selling it all and going back to the very basics. I used to make more music in the old days. Then again I didn't have 3 kids, 3 jobs and a very real and threatening mortgage back then. I lived on student loans and "free money" from the state. Yeah, things were definitely easier back in the good old days.

/end weird rambling

Cheers!
bManic

[bmanic]

interesting, as cdsoundmster is praised so highly in so many topics, to read the opposite. FWIW the cupwise and rhythm mind were already the main two neb devs i was going to check and cupwise even has demos of sorts, so there you go. Thanks very much for the info/opinions.

I've always thought Eric's (rhythn in mind) programs are the most musical and interesting Nebula programs on the planet. There's just something very special with his programs. For instance his vari-mu program is just magical, very thick, very groovy and very weird! Probably buggy as hell too in that it doesn't take into account the Nebula threshold bug that cupwise found.

I still think that the Nebula compressors don't really function as they should, not even Cupwise's programs. I've never been able to successfully sample any of our outboard compressors and have them behave even remotely as the hardware. It's just not going to happen. There's a reason why Sintefex (focusrite liquidmix technology creator) did it the way they did, combining a look-up table kind of thing which then feeds into the dynamic convolution thing.

There are some huge issues with having snapshots at various dynamic levels and then mixing between them. A lot of artifacts, that didn't happen in the sampled equipment, will be the end result.. The antidote being clever smoothing and interpolation thus getting some kind of working model but quite far from the real deal.

But we shouldn't be so worried about how close the thing matches to the sampled hardware but rather embrace the awesomeness Nebula itself brings to the table. It can do some very interesting things which no other plugin or outboard processor can and it DOES SOUND AWESOME (in my opinion)!

Cheers!
bManic

[jens]

Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn't be better off just selling it all and going back to the very basics. I used to make more music in the old days. Then again I didn't have 3 kids, 3 jobs and a very real and threatening mortgage back then. I lived on student loans and "free money" from the state. Yeah, things were definitely easier back in the good old days.

Three already? I only know about your first one...


personally I'm way more productive now, that I barely have any time for making music, than I was when I had plenty and plenty of time... I'm way more focussed.
(I can compose, write, arrange, record and produce a song to about 90% completion within two sessions of about 3-4 hours each - (the remaining ten percent, now that is another thing )).

But I am also doing a lot in the analog domain - not because of aliasing, but because it saves a lot of time and somehow feels more "real" to me.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[bmanic]

I didn't say it's bootsie did I?

You'll just have to see if the mystery master decides to reveal his findings or start PMing/emailing talented developers randomly. I'm not going to divulge what he/she/it said unless they themselves confirm it's okay to do so. I probably gave out too many details of who it might be.. my bad (sorry mystery person!).

Cheers!
bManic

[Burillo]

i like how people say that aliasing adds up and damages the sound, while completely disregarding gratuitous DA/AD conversions (and with it - noise, clock skew et al) that inevitably happen when you use analog hardware

[bmanic]

i like how people say that aliasing adds up and damages the sound, while completely disregarding gratuitous DA/AD conversions (and with it - clock skew et al) that inevitably happen when you use analog hardware

Very true! AD/DA conversion over and over again does take it's toll on the sound but as far as I know it doesn't add irrelevant harmonic content, or does it?

I'm also lucky enough to have really good AD/DA conversion so it wouldn't be a big issue for me personally but you do have a good point.

Actually, now that I think about it, isn't the main "damage" done by AD/DA conversion happening at the analogue stage, the filtering stage? That's the most critical component as far as I know and it's the one where cheap sound cards usually do quite a bit of damage. The single chip technology has gotten really good in the past few years though so can it really have such a large impact on the sounds? I don't think I've ever done more than 2 or 3 generations of outboard bounces but you do raise a very interesting question. How many generations of out->in-out->in processing can you do without seriously changing the signal? And how do those changes damage the whole mix? Aliasing damages the whole mix by having a lot of stray harmonics which aren't at all related to the song harmonically.. or that's my theory of the damage caused (and it might be completely wrong!).

Cheers!
bManic