Saturation Tools for 2021

[Hettoblaster]

Brand new, very good & intro price until dec 1; Kiive Distict. for only about €20..
and you may as well check out his other plugs - BF sale. All Kiive's preamps/sat are good/great. Tapeface is great. also tapeface is getting a hefty free upgrade soon.. Nice new Dev!
https://www.kiiveaudio.com/plugins?utm_ ... 02f5494194

Kiieve himself has been so brave to put an /a/b on YT between Distict and the Overstayer it's modelled on.
Distict is WAY better than €20, very good saturator and close to the Overstayer imo BUT...
with the Overstayer i can hear that extra 'aura' (depth/width/3Dness). That unit is €3000 though!
The quest for this 'depth' was kinda my topic this year and i definitely did not test all, and skipped the very expensive and very cpu hungry ones, but the depth in the overstayer here i've heard esp with London Acoustics TAIPEI (which is on sale btw) and KIT BB N105 and next BBHG2-MS (and Airwindows Console). [PS: yes i know - TAIPEI is very cpu intense and really to much for my current iMac]
EDIT: i did not test: Kelvin, Softtube Overstaeyer MAS, any other acoustica audio, VSM-4 amongst others

[NomadMonad]

Besides all the plugins mentioned so far, I have recently (re)discovered bad buss mojo by https://www.stillwellaudio.com/. Amazing wave shaper.

[greyman666]

SSL FUSION DRIVE

TONE SHAPER KELVIN

[imrae]

In the year 2021, there is no reason why paid plugins should not have an option to produce zero aliasing (oversampling) or enable auto-gain compensation--features that have been available in some plugins for several years now.

SDRR has both oversampling and auto-gain. But oversampling doesn't mean zero aliasing. The goal is to reduce aliasing to acceptable levels - ideally below the noise floor. In practice this is very difficult for heavy distortion.

In research papers such as http://dafx.de/paper-archive/2016/dafxp ... _41-PN.pdf we see that it is possible to reduce aliasing of a nonlinear function by ingenious design of the digital implementation - but for the best results it is still necessary to run at a high sample rate (i.e. oversample). Even then, we can see some aliasing in the plots.

[sambaji]

An approach I use when testing saturation plugins is to adjust the saturation plugin to where I want it on a track or mix, then copy the plugin to a new midi track and test for audible aliasing using Melda's free Mosciliator and spectrogram such as Mmultianalyzer (or its free lite version Manalyzer), playing a pure sine wave at a high frequency such as 18khz. Sometimes, I'll use a step lowpass filter to filter out the original signals so I hear mainly the aliasing. I've been surprised of the audible "dirt"/artifacts that some saturation plugins introduce even at moderate settings, not pushing it into the extremes. Some plugins use additional techniques to reduce aliasing such as the "Clean" setting in Kelvin Tone Shaper saturator which works quite well, when combined with the plugin's maximum oversampling.

[Ploki]

are you sure it's all aliasing tho. Might be intermodulation distortion or sideband distortion.

I like clean in Kelvin, but it can dull some sounds

[Bulbizarre]

I bought Kelvin too. Still not hardware level but closer than most plugins. The widener knob sold me in.

[LFO8]

I bought Kelvin too. Still not hardware level but closer than most plugins. The widener knob sold me in.

For hardware level: Blackbox HG2 MS

[TIMT]

I bought Kelvin too. Still not hardware level but closer than most plugins. The widener knob sold me in.

For hardware level: Blackbox HG2 MS

The modelling in Blackbox HG2 MS is identical to the first one apart from the addition of M/S. HG2 doesn't have any sensitivities to frequencies which is unusual for a device supposedly modelled on tubes and nothing about it struck me as hardware like..even from Youtube i can tell that it's not really comparable to the thing it is modelled on. In terms of plugins, that can sound hardware-ish despite not modelling any particular device, i think Kelvin combined with Spectre can get really close to that "aura"(as somebody else put it)that hardware does

[sambaji]

are you sure it's all aliasing tho. Might be intermodulation distortion or sideband distortion.

I like clean in Kelvin, but it can dull some sounds

Can you have intermodulation/sideband distortion that occurs in hardware in a plugin without specifically programming an algorithm for it? The degree of "aliasing" frequencies that appear lower than the fundamental is proportional to how close I bring the fundamental to the Nyquist (e.g., 20khz). Plugins that have adequate oversampling, the more reputable ones, produce less of this phenomenon as oversampling increases (e.g., 16x). I also test the plugins using moderate to subtle sittings. Perhaps, I could rule out intermodulation/sideband distortion, if indeed that is a possibility, in plugins without adequate oversampling by increasing my sample rate. Regardless, some saturation plugins produce some pretty unpleasant sounding artifacts below the fundamental sinewave near the Nyquist, which I don't want in my mixes.

[NinjaToon]

Whatever about the sound of BB Vs Kelvin (horses for courses), the thing about BB is that you only every use like 1-2%. I always feel if I'm only ever using a tiny fraction of a dials range they over did it.

With Kelvin you have a lot more of a range to find your sweet spot and I really appreciate that.

And yeah Kelvin lacks that "Air" thing but it's easy to find that with sommit else. Although if they put an exciter circuit type thing into Kelvin I wouldn't complain.

[LFO8]

What you describe (only 1-2% range) is a matter of gain staging.

[NinjaToon]

What you describe (only 1-2% range) is a matter of gain staging.

Please explain? I follow best practice with GS always have but I still don't understand what you mean.

[Unaspected]

What you describe (only 1-2% range) is a matter of gain staging.

Please explain? I follow best practice with GS always have but I still don't understand what you mean.

I was going to say the same.

If you lower your input then the following gain stage will have more range.

[NinjaToon]

What you describe (only 1-2% range) is a matter of gain staging.

Please explain? I follow best practice with GS always have but I still don't understand what you mean.

I was going to say the same.

If you lower your input then the following gain stage will have more range.

I guess I'm not in the habit of inserting gain adjustment between processors on a master bus. I would set it early then adjust it at the end if needs must and if I do I never find any travel on BB but I would for Kelvin at the same RMS (hottest mixbus for me would be -16-14 at the most).

I guess it's true that I could drop it down to sub -20 to find more travel tho but that's fiddlyness I generally wouldn't pursue, especially when I don't have to do that for any other saturator in my experience. I just don't think there's enough usable travel on BB. Like there is no way you would go to one o clock or beyond on BB right?