Fabfilter equivalents/near equivalents?

[elxsound]

I would just save money in the long run and buy the Fab Filter plugins and little else, honestly.

Agreed. In the long run this saved me money (and time).

Its always easy to supplement the Fabfilter stuff with character tools (plugins modeled after famous sounding hardware), but this is the collection I would recommend to build around.

This forum will recommend one of everything even if the OP responds and says what they've decided, and people have their reasons.

If the people that initially spoke to you are people you trust, I'd go with that.

[kingpinpearce]

Thanks everyone for your feedback. I have a plan and direction to go in, which will probably involve saving up over time for the Fabfilter plug-ins and making do with some of your suggestions for the time being. Thanks also for not "dumb noob"ing me on any of the responses. I fully recognize quality requires investiture - I'm not cheap, just not flush at the moment.

Sweetwater sells the Fabfilter line too and I can do three split payments with a small surcharge, so that may be a good route as well.

[gentleclockdivider]

dmg ( steve gamble )is verry good indeed

[cfanyc]

For EQ I find this an amazing alternative to Pro Q2.

https://cravedsp.com/crave-eq

this ^

[Arrested Developer]

I would recommend you to try out different products before investing.
There are lots of high quality plug ins which suit different persons with different needs and different workflows.

There are different aspects to take into consideration.
If you have golden ears, e. g. it may be needless to have an EQ without a spectral feedback of what's going on.
If not, an EQ that does have it but sounds 10% worse than another one, may be a better choice, cause it gets you better results.

Another thing: if you have perfect recordings with superb mics and superb preamps etc., transparent plug ins without any coloration (as the fabfilter stuff) might be perfect.
if not, maybe it's good to have options that add some mojo.

What i'm saying basically: don't believe that there are perfect objective solutions for your needs, since the user is always a subject with subjective needs.

[MogwaiBoy]

Just want to add that at least in my experience the Ozone EQ doesn't compare sonically to Fabfilter. If you do the exact same EQ moves on both and A/B between them, you'll hear a degredation in clarity with the Ozone EQ. Same goes for IKM's 'EQual'.

[DarkStar]

^^^^
Setting controls to the same numbers in different plug-in will only produce the same results if the underlying algorithms are the same. Or have I missed the point?

[heavymetalmixer]

^^^^
Setting controls to the same numbers in different plug-in will only produce the same results if the underlying algorithms are the same. Or have I missed the point?

Even though some people say that all digital EQs sound the same that isn't actually true, because of many factors like the kind of filters, how they deal with the phase shift, the delay to the signal, if there are non-linearities, if it has antialiasing and how good is the implementation, if it's 100% transparent, etc.

[rod_zero]

Reaper is a good DAW and all but the GUI of its plugins is not very intuitive, if you want to go in that direction I would invest in a DAW (ableton Live, studio one) before a fx suite as fabfilter's, you get more effects and instruments for a broad range of applications.

[MogwaiBoy]

^^^^
Setting controls to the same numbers in different plug-in will only produce the same results if the underlying algorithms are the same. Or have I missed the point?

They're never the same though. Try it for yourself, do a 5db boost at 2000hz on 5 different EQs... they'll all sound different. Which is better is purely subjective though. I'm saying that in my testing Pro-Q always comes out on top in terms of "clean digital EQ" (ie: vs IKM, Ozone etc). Sure, there are no non-linearities to worry about but there are subtle differences in phase shift, filter shape, quality, precision and so on.

[DarkStar]

Sorry that I was not clear. That's what I meant - they will not (Can never?) be the same.

[hivkorn]

there is no fabfilter plugin clone ..if you don't have enough money ,just save money and buy it when you can.

[JonWymore]

Toneboosters to me are Really close to Fabfilter for a fraction of the price.
TOkyo Dawn and other recommendations like Klanghelm top notch as well

[Burillo]

dmg ( steve gamble )is verry good indeed

The "D" in DMG tells me you're wrong about him being Steve

[gentleclockdivider]

dmg ( steve gamble )is verry good indeed

The "D" in DMG tells me you're wrong about him being Steve

Dave