How can the average consumer tell if the plugin is actually worth the asking price?

[V0RT3X]

I've been wondering this for a while, but seeing how I have no idea how to code DSP I'm often left wondering "Is this plugin really worth the price I paid?" or "Did i score a really good deal here?"

How do you weigh the value in the world of DSP?

How can a consumer be certain they aren't being sold a fancy gui which uses very basic DSP programming and some kind of saturation in the signal flow to fool someone into thinking it's circuit modelled or w/e?

Is there a organization that developers can join that proves they are a good quality developer? Like a independent group that can offer a seal of quality to a member after reviewing their development processes.

Maybe the developer spent more money on the marketing campaign and GUI instead of the actual quality of the programming?

Or maybe you're getting really old technology as far as DSP goes and the developer is still asking a lot of money for it. Normally people think if they pay MORE money they are getting better quality, but in the DSP world does that still hold true?


How can the average consumer who knows nothing about DSP programming find out what they are buying?

Also how can a developer be transparent enough to convince the consumer they are making good quality without giving all there secrets away to the competition?

[bmanic]

The average consumer can't. It takes a fair bit of know-how and being burned a couple of times to learn all the shady practices.

Case in point: https://www.gearslutz.com/board/new-pro ... mixes.html

(scroll down for my debunking/myth busting).

Luckily quite a few people are ready to fight against these types of products so if the end user is a bit patient then the truth eventually comes out. Patience is the name of the game. Never ever jump on anything too early or too eagerly, especially if your gut tells you that something is "too good to be true".

Educating the masses will eventually lead to better practices. In the case of shoddy DSP or trying to sell something simple with a fancy GUI, we may perhaps need a good "debunking" thread.. basics of audio analysis and critical listening. Where the very basics are explained. This way we can fight audiophilia and other non-scientific nonsense and keep people educated.

All of this of course falls apart when something is completely subjective. Even old, well known, bad DSP can "sound great" to a potential buyer. As long as that person has the chance to properly evaluate the product and still after extensive testing thinks it's great, then it is great, no matter what the underlying DSP is. And this is perfectly okay in my book. I used to be one of those annoying pricks who tell people what is "correct" and what isn't but I've since gotten a bit wiser with age (well at least I strive not to be that person any more.. I sometimes fail, miserably). There simply is no discussing subjective things and never should be. We can only deal with facts and scientific truths. Once these are established, then taste has free reign.

EDIT: There are a couple of warning signs always.. look at the thread I linked to.

TeslaST, our vision of the original unit, has been in development for almost two years, using three different reference units to achieve the best possible results.

.. really? 2 years in development and I can null the plugin to -92dBFS (so far this is the best I've managed) with a simple mid/side encoder + EQ. Took me about 20 minutes to figure out (most of the time was fiddling around with testing tools).

TeslaST is a very special plugin that replicates a pretty unknown hardware piece used by well known A list mixing engineers.

Another warning sign.

This stereo enhancement technique was first used on the album ¨Baby¨ by the famous Swiss band Yello. By the mid 90s it was used on radio broadcast stations such as the UK´s Radio One and Radio Four, live by artists such as Orbital, Moby, Carl Cox, Frank Sinatra and the Mills Brothers as well as in films such as Back To The Future 2 and Disney´s Little Mermaid.

Nowadays, this technique has become part of the sound of great mixes by artists such as Fleetwood Mac, John Mayer, Coldplay, The Black Keys and Arctic Monkeys.

Name dropping.. trying to sell your product based on famous names. Yet another warning sign.

The original hardware is very hard to find, but there are some still in use in several important studios worldwide. The impressive stereo enhancement effect made this unit a very desirable piece of gear, but with a street price of close to US$6,000 in 1990, it was only accessible to big artists and studios.

Based on expensive, exclusive hardware, in this case a brand not even mentioned. You guessed it.. a clear warning sign.

[Michael L]

^^^Great post bmanic!
I'll present a complementary approach, to calculate the value of the plugin to you:

the number of hours you will spend using the plugin over ~2 years
-
the number of hours to learn the software
x
the value of your labour
÷
the ratio of labour-to-equipment cost (>10)
-
the cost of any plugin it will be made obsolete
=
worth to you

[Aleatoriac]

Nothing can ever be worth the asking price. 2nd law of thermodynamics. It's nobody's fault... Just the way it is.

[BertKoor]

This is exactly why freeware is so great: cost nothing but worth a lot!

[ghettosynth]

Bmanic is spot on here. Beyond that, I think about this in several ways.

First, I start with a basic thesis.

All plugins are worth about $20, some are worth less, some are worth more.

I have spent more than $20 on more than a few plugins, however, and some are worth much less. But, by starting with that idea I don't fall into this trap of thinking about the discount from retail. Case in point is Bus Driver from Nomad which was given away a few years ago. Yes I have it, I like it sometimes, I got it for free. However, I was never swayed by the $149 (or whatever it was) original retail price. Is it worth the $10 or so they ask for it now, maybe, if you need it, but the discount from retail shouldn't be your trigger.

For me, I'm looking for actual value in terms of signal processing or modeling that isn't something that I can easily get with other tools or a workflow that isn't as easy to get with other tools. On the signal processing side you have to do some reading, and then some more reading. You have to disregard most enthusiastic reviews and you have to learn how to read in between the lines. In some cases, you have to do some testing, like bmanic did above. You should always do a basic blind test. If nothing else set up the plugin so that you are level nulled with it in and out and then position the mouse pointer over the bypass, close your eyes, click rapidly some number of times such that you've lost count of position, and now turn it on and off. You should be able to tell when it's on or not.
With your eyes remaining closed turn on and off a number of times and tell yourself that it is on, or off. Now open your eyes, is is in the state you thought it was in? Don't laugh, this has worked on more than one occasion for me to reject something that I could have sworn that I heard the difference when my eyes were open.

Workflow is easier because you just have to decide for yourself if the workflow enhancement is worth the asking price. A great example here is EQ. I don't think that modeling EQs are all that necessary for making music, but, they make getting some kinds of sounds much easier so I don't mind having a few on hand. I have yet to pay more than about $20 for one though, and that's in keeping with my thesis above.

I could say more, but I'll leave it at that for now.

[aciddose]

An unfortunate reality in software is that whatever it is that you're willing to pay for the software in question, it very likely cost more to actually produce.

The amount of code in modern software is quite huge. One of the worst aspects of this (in my own opinion) is that about 80% or more of the effort goes to the GUI!

If you want to think about how much the software is worth try breaking it into parts. How useful would it be without a GUI? How useful would the GUI be without the audio parts?

In the majority of cases I'm certain you'd feel the GUI would be entirely useless without anything behind it. It would after all just be a screenshot that doesn't actually do anything!

How useful is the GUI when added to the functional parts? Aesthetics in reality are absolutely useless. They aren't very expensive either though. You can hire an artist to produce graphical elements for a webpage or software GUI for a couple weeks at around 1k to 2k typically. Aesthetics make up only a very small fraction of the effort invested toward the GUI.

The UI itself can be essential however if you can separate aesthetic elements. So you should be questioning whether the design was from a UI perspective or an aesthetic perspective? Was the UI allowed to be sacrificed in order to accommodate aesthetic changes or improvements?

My experience has been that in many cases the UI elements are not optimized but rather allowed to be put to sacrifice for the benefit of aesthetics. In those cases it should be clear that this majority of the effort invested toward the GUI is then rendered useless to you the user as it does not improve access to the underlying functions of the software.

If we're making the assumption the GUI took 50% of the effort to create the software this means that the actual value of the software is somewhere between 100% and 50% of its sale price just from looking at the GUI alone! None the less the effort was invested and it is not possible for you to vote with your wallet and take only the functional part of the software without the GUI. They are sold only as a complete package.

So that should just give some ideas about what to look at.

As for myself: I've never once bought a single plug-in, ever. I've tried some demos and used a bit of free software briefly but always very quickly find issues that I can not accept. So to me personally the value of the entire existing software market of audio plug-ins is worth exactly zero.

I have found it quite interesting however to create my own software. I also give it to anyone who wants a copy completely free of charge as I would not expect anyone else to pay any more than I would be willing to pay myself. Xhip for example is worth several years in total, possibly around the 5k man-hours mark at minimum. At $10/h this works out to me having paid a personal price of $50,000 for Xhip alone.

Would you ever pay that for one plug-in?

[V0RT3X]

Some good feedback here, I'll read this and mull over it in the morning. Well it's technically morning here right now @ 2:07am, so I guess I mean later this morning when I'm supposed to wake up at 7:00am.

[egbert101]

<delete>

[stratum]

Usually I only buy the plugins that I actually need. So far those were truepianos and synthmaster, only. The first was for playing the piano with a midi keyboard and the second was for learning about synths in general. With that reasoning whether a plugin is worth the asking price is quite easy to determine. Just look for an equally capable alternative, and if it's cheaper, then the first one you have found wasn't worth the asking price, at that point in time. Facts may change in the future. Have I ever bought anything I didn't actually need? Yes I did, that was an I.K. multimedia sampletank bundle at a serious discount, but I rarely ever use it, because I don't actually need it, besides it's not easy to reinstall a few gigabytes of samples every time I happen to reinstall windows for some reason. So in spite of the bundle discount, its value to me is zero at the moment.

[SODDI]

If anyone consistently and repeatedly recommends very expensive plugins (most likely romplers) to everyone, those plug-ins are probably is too expensive by double.

It brings to mind the old Aesop's fable about the fox who got his tail cut off.

[stratum]

If anyone consistently and repeatedly recommends very expensive plugins (most likely romplers) to everyone, those plug-ins are probably is too expensive by double.

Are they actually expensive? Often, they just can be inconvenient. The thing that considerably increases their "price" is the installation time.

[aciddose]

Also how can a developer be transparent enough to convince the consumer they are making good quality without giving all there secrets away to the competition?

More important is how you as a customer define "good quality".

The plug-in is merely a black box with a fancy label printed on it to you. You have no idea what might be inside; nor should you really care. You can plug it in to your software of choice and use it as you want. It falls entirely and squarely upon you yourself to answer the question of whether it does what you want it to do or not.

There is no practical way to answer your question because of the question itself being unanswerable. Sure, we might try to understand the cost of production in terms of the various investments which have been made. It is not possible however to define objectively the answer to a subjective question!

Ultimately convincing the customer they are making a wise purchase involves many complex factors, no small part of which is pure marketing and hand-waving with very little to do with the products themselves. Human beings are frighteningly easy to manipulate emotionally and when driven to act based upon their emotions are often very primitive decision makers at best. One key aspect is the trustworthiness of the purveyor of the good. Only the least trustworthy would focus entirely on inspiring your confidence in themselves whilst quickly presenting argumentum ad passiones about their product... lest you decide to objectively assess its true worth.

[Zombie Queen]

In many cases, the plugins are probably not worth developing in the first place. Meaning, the dev would make more money serving burgers at fastfood shop or a gas station on a half-time job. So if you really like something, maybe it's worth overpaying a bit, as an investment in dev's survival.

[xoxos]

type in a text editor instead of a forum, soon you'll know for sure