Bitwig Sound Quality

[askewd]

Hi guys

Being a mixing engineer i am a little (ok a lot) anal about sound quality etc. I decided to put the bigwigs inbuilt devices to test against some of my other more established 3rd party tools.

Firstly i compared Bitwigs EQ5 against the Waves SSL eq. I used pink noise and heavily boost a low mid frequency and then did a complete sweep with the highs. I tried to match the two as close as possible by ear.

The result was this:

(audio ) https://audiofreaks.box.com/s/76h68t9jyz3dgyk2bwro
(image) https://audiofreaks.box.com/s/6wl8c31mrmj43xrh49an

Basically this file is a splice between the EQ5 and the SSL-E - see what you think. In my humble opinion i think they are near identical. (saying this i am not at the mastering studio today but have done this in my DT880 pro headphones).

I also tested against nebular Manley passive EQ (mammoth) which is an extremely well rated EQ and the Nebula Pultec programs (which are regarded as superior to most 'normal vst' eqs) . Again, I feel i was able to match the sound completely using EQ5 with minimal effort.

Here are some examples:
pultec low boost (pink noise) : https://audiofreaks.box.com/s/eoj3jv2t0ks7at1srd2i
pultec low boost (same settings on a music loop) : https://audiofreaks.box.com/s/3ybv427hu3k4jq8oqjnv

[on these examples the first half of the audio is Nebular the second is EQ5]

Finally i did some tests comparing the Waves SSL-E Compressor with the Bitwig DYNAMICS device... and again i was able to get the sound virtually identical pretty quickly.

Overall i would have no issue at all using these 2 internal devices in professional mixing jobs.

Cheers
Dale
ps. i realise this wasn't a super deep scientific test... there are lots of aspects I haven't tested such as pre-ringing , how it reacts dynamically and all that ... maybe i'll get deeper when i have more time. this was literally for my own curiosity of whether i could get any where close to matching the sound of these respected plugins and felt it was worth sharing.

[Cyoon]

cool thx for sharing!

[c-wave]

Cool. Thanks for sharing. Any further detailed testing is also appreciated.

[askewd]

bloody hell... i have to share this too as it's crazy...

Not only is the Dynamics device fantastic sounding imo, but it's SO efficient.... I stopped counting at a 1000 instances and the CPU only just reached half load at 256k buffer!! mental !

[Cyoon]

and it works in audio rate, so its pretty precise when modulated with another native plugin.

[hibidy]

I like EQ-5. The only thing I wish is that the mousewheel didn't just do wide/narrow Q.

[lem8r]

SRC test was not so good http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 9&t=408539

[kurasu]

SRC test was not so good http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 9&t=408539

1.1 adds a special oversampling down-sampling path which was not included in 1.0 due to time-constraints. Any remaining interpolation noise should definitely be below what you can hear, unless you transpose more than 2 octaves up or so.

[F5DX]

I agree about the Dynamics plugin quality. I have been demoing a few plugins in the recent days like Waves LA2A, DBX 160 and Softube Dynamite. I can nearly match the sounds of those plugins with the Dynamics plugin of Bitwig with a little bit of tweaking. In some cases, I need to use for example Sonnox Inflator in front of the Dynamics to get more color, but seems like I do not need to buy those plugins afterall. Instead, I believe I just replicate a few of the usual settings I would go with and save with the Dynamics. Will be very interesting, when Bitwig allow users to modify and create new devices. I wish they allow modifying the internal sidechain paths of the compressors too.

I wish that they add an FFT analyzer to the EQ!