Playfair Audio Dynamic Grading - new compressor

[muki]

haven't seen it mentioned yet:

Playfair Audio Dynamic Grading

quite an imho very very interesting and well done compressor

https://playfair-audio.com/dynamic-grading/

[flampton]

Thanks for posting this, I'll be giving it a try this weekend. How is the cpu usage per instance?

[foosnark]

That's a neat interface. Kind of reminds me in some ways of the Graphic Dynamics tool in Sound Forge, but clearer. Gonna have to try this one.

[bmanic]

Very interesting concept. Unfortunately the actual user interface experience is really bad. First of all, there is no way to reset the handles back to default, at least not as far as I can tell. Second, there is no wet/dry control which would be super useful. Third, there is no overall main Volume/Gain control as far as I can tell.. meaning you'll constantly end up juggling the damn handles just to maintain unity gain. Fourth, there's no way to move ALL the boxes, the whole area, to maintain the overall "shape" in case the incoming audio volume drastically changes. This is even more troublesome as there is no internal gain staging possibility, often leading to weird sounding gating/expansion on note tails and reverbs.

Finally, the sound quality. So far I have not been able to get satisfactory results out of it. But that's probably because it is so difficult to control those tiny handles. I also seem to hear some kind of FFT like artifacts on "crazy" settings.. almost like the audio is divided into "chunks" somehow. However, this may be placebo on my part due to how the interface is created.

It's also quite obviously not been beta tested by actual working professionals as all of my points above I discovered within the first 5 minutes of testing and many of them are absolute show stoppers in terms of workflow.

The marketing speak on the website it's made to be easy to use, yet it's the exact opposite. It's very fiddly and cumbersome to use.

.. price: 149 Euros. Good luck with that.

Having said that, I will continue to experiment with this as long as I have the demo running.

[thecontrolcentre]

Price: £168.00

[DJErmac]

Kinda reminds me of something but I can’t remember what...

dynamizergui.gif

[muki]

Third, there is no overall main Volume/Gain control as far as I can tell..

if you hover over the middle of the right handlebars,
all of them hi-lite, dragging them acts like a master output vol/gain

Fourth, there's no way to move ALL the boxes, the whole area,

hover over the middle part of the left handles
all six handles (input and output) should hilite
all of them can be draged

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Kinda reminds me of something but I can’t remember what...
dynamizergui.gif

AKA Elemental Audio's "Neodynium." I miss that thing. Had no idea at the time how to use it. Like "the one that got away", I'd really love a second chance with a compressor that did all that and worked well.

[bmanic]

I spent more time with the plugin today and have to say it's really growing on me. Now that I understand how to compensate for both input and output gain (thanks muki!) it's a lot easier to use.

The underlying dynamics algorithm itself seems really musical/transparent when not pushed too hard (which is easy to do). I keep the response at quite large values and then try to dial in the release stage so that it all feels natural.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this plugin is how easy it is to mangle something completely out of realistic proportions. It can very easily sound extremely bad and I suspect this may turn some people off (it did for me my first initial impressions). If you however really carefully tune the various amplitude ranges to either very lightly expand or compress, you can get some truly stellar results with it!

Now all I'm missing is a dry/wet control and variable stereo linking. I'd also like a bit more control over the sidechain filtering.. I'd like to "tell" the compressor more precisely what to listen to, but the Spectrum knob will do for now (I mostly have it set between 1 and 3.. going into larger values can quickly make things very pumpy and unnatural).

[foosnark]

I finally got around to playing with it, and I like it quite a bit. For my purposes, the ability to take it to extremes is a plus.

I'm really doubting the price though.

[cbtw]

It's also quite obviously not been beta tested by actual working professionals as all of my points above I discovered within the first 5 minutes of testing and many of them are absolute show stoppers in terms of workflow.

Hey there. I have been part of a beta tester team that has been carefully choosen (mainly musicians and production professionals) and well considered during the development process.
If you have any questions regarding the practical use of it, feel free to ask. I have used it already on two album mixes and also some special voice treatments like dialogue and panel discussion in post pro for broadcast applications.

1. Get rid of the concept "compressor".
It is not comparable with a standard compressor or a chain of them, like in products with similar displays.
Every compressor on the market controls the whole volume range of a signal, while triggered by variable thresholds. Some of them do the same in a certain frequency range like multiband comps or deessers. This is NOT the case with the Dynamic Grading Plug In.
Here we can target different volume ranges with different settings in a way that hasn't been explored until now. If you need to inspire your imagination, compare it with the dynamic grading in graphics.

2. Please read the manual before making assumptions.

3. Yes, you can do both, having a subtile to drastic control about where in the dynamic range you want to have a certain signal- but you can also take it to the max by for instance crushing drums and pulling all room noise up or expanding it down in almost unnatural ways.

4. Check out the "spectrum" parameter! Here you can, as oppose to any other product out there, define the character of the signal analysis that is the base of the grading process, from flat white noise up to different stages of the Fletcher Munson curves (like in A/B/C weighted measurements in acoustics).

5. While it can be helpful in some cases there too, this is not intended to be a bus/mastering tool.
The arena it really shines is on channel signals in the stage of volume and dynamic balancing during a mix.

[bmanic]

1. Get rid of the concept "compressor".
It is not comparable with a standard compressor or a chain of them, like in products with similar displays.
Every compressor on the market controls the whole volume range of a signal, while triggered by variable thresholds. Some of them do the same in a certain frequency range like multiband comps or deessers. This is NOT the case with the Dynamic Grading Plug In.
Here we can target different volume ranges with different settings in a way that hasn't been explored until now. If you need to inspire your imagination, compare it with the dynamic grading in graphics.

This simply isn't true. There are plenty of dynamics processors out there that allow you to target different ranges of the actual dynamics. All you need is an editable transfer function.. so for instance some Melda products let you do this, DDMF Comprezzore lets you do this, there was also the age old neodynium or whatever it was called and plenty of freeware stuff where you can edit the transfer function.

However, I do think Dynamic Grading has a really unique approach to the user interface in how you can set it up. You have much less control but it's very immediate and almost always seems to work rather nicely.

2. Please read the manual before making assumptions.

I did. Also, the marketing blurb says that one of the main reasons for the plugins existence is to be "easy to use" and "easy to understand". It isn't as I couldn't find some basic functionality just by tinkering around with it.

Thus it should be improved visually to make things like these more obvious (I've already emailed suggestions for this very thing).

3. Yes, you can do both, having a subtile to drastic control about where in the dynamic range you want to have a certain signal- but you can also take it to the max by for instance crushing drums and pulling all room noise up or expanding it down in almost unnatural ways.

Indeed. However, you have a bit less control over all of this than what you'd have with something like Comprezzore that has traditional and completely user configurable program dependent attack & release. I do however like how the "smart" algorithm in Dynamic Grading sounds, for the most part.

4. Check out the "spectrum" parameter! Here you can, as oppose to any other product out there, define the character of the signal analysis that is the base of the grading process, from flat white noise up to different stages of the Fletcher Munson curves (like in A/B/C weighted measurements in acoustics).

Again, it is not a unique control and is quite self explanatory. I have been using it a lot yes. There's definitely no mention about Fletcher Munson curves or A/B/C weighting though. Those curves are NOT within white/pink/brown noise profiles but have actual hard contours to them (lots of very specific dips and boosts). Also, worth noting that the actual loudness curves, straight from the various studies, vary with loudness.. so using them as general compensation curves is not usually a good idea.

5. While it can be helpful in some cases there too, this is not intended to be a bus/mastering tool.
The arena it really shines is on channel signals in the stage of volume and dynamic balancing during a mix.

I've tried it now on almost every possible audio signal and I do find it really good on complex audio sources. I prefer more traditional compressors on instruments though as part of using a compressor is NOT for the dynamic control but rather as a spice and a "rhythm" enhancer. When you smash a drumbus, you don't do it only to smash it, to control the dynamics.. you set the attack and release in a way that helps the drum groove. Same for a vocal performance, you usually set the attack and release in such a way that it helps the consonants push through (or diminish them, if you want the vocal to feel more floaty and mellow).

So far, I find Dynamic Grading works best on very complex sources where you want some more details from the dynamics (especially if you tilt it towards white noise spectrum.. between 1-2 on the spectrum knob) and some nice stereo movement if you run the plugin in dual mono configuration.

I can also imagine Dynamic Grading being really good at controlling podcast recordings as here we aren't dealing with music (usually) and just want the overall dynamics to be even.. but again, there are tools for these things like iZotope RX that can completely level and balance whole podcasts with basically the push of a single button and offline rendering or even batch processing of hours of data in a few seconds.

It's definitely got it's own unique signature sound and that's NOT because of being able to target different volume layers, that can be done with other tools too, but rather because of how it's look-a-head "smart" timing constants seem to work. That is unique and can't be duplicated with other tools and that is in my opinion the main "worth" of the plugin itself. It's own unique type of dynamics processing/action. It's sound. It's soul.

[cbtw]

There are plenty of dynamics processors out there that allow you to target different ranges of the actual dynamics.

I'd like you to specifically name one where we can look at what is similar and what isn't.
I checked the DDMF, maybe I need help on this but I only see the possibility to have different thresholds, or even curves, but this is only about the key signal. The results are always applied on the whole signal, right?
That's where I see the uniqueness in the Dynamic Grading because it doesn't do it over time (therefore we don't need attack parameters) but at the same moment on different level- let's say -aspects within the same time window. Correct me If I'm wrong but I really haven't seen this before. And if you think there was a product in the past, please show it after having considered my point.

[bmanic]

There are plenty of dynamics processors out there that allow you to target different ranges of the actual dynamics.

I'd like you to specifically name one where we can look at what is similar and what isn't.
I checked the DDMF, maybe I need help on this but I only see the possibility to have different thresholds, or even curves, but this is only about the key signal. The results are always applied on the whole signal, right?
That's where I see the uniqueness in the Dynamic Grading because it doesn't do it over time (therefore we don't need attack parameters) but at the same moment on different level- let's say -aspects within the same time window. Correct me If I'm wrong but I really haven't seen this before. And if you think there was a product in the past, please show it after having considered my point.

The transfer function is exactly what you change to affect "many different parts" of the amplitude in one go. Think about it, how does amplitude work? A signal in the digital domain goes from zero to 1 to zero to -1. If you rectify that signal (which you do within a compressor sidechain most of the time) you have from zero to 1.

Now if you change the transfer curve such that it upward expands at the value 0.2 to 0.6 but compresses from 0.7 to 1, there you have the whole thing. Two things happen in "one cycle", one "detection" of the incoming audio transient, at the set amount of threshold (aka the "detection point" where things start happening in accordance with your set time constants). So if you want to affect the whole signal, you just set a deep threshold.. or in the case of a custom editable transfer function, you just "draw where the action happens".

You can of course also run multiple versions of these plugins in parallel. The upside of doing this is that you get multiple possibilities of setting the attack and release.. but it is not necessary.

The only plugin that has done something very similar, in terms of user interface, to Dynamic Grading, was the old Neodynium compressor that literally ran 4 different compressors with their own "transfer function slot" in parallel. It even gave you separate attack and release stages for everything.

Dynamic Grading very much relies on it's automatic analysis of the incoming signal (thus the HUGE amount of latency for it to work correctly.. just compare it with the 'live mode' and hear just how different it sounds). The user can only set a rather rudimentary release stage and has no real control over the attack or how the processor reacts to peaks vs sustained/rms signal levels. That is all automatically controlled by the single 'Response' control.

In conclusion: It's all about the user interface and what is presented. What Dynamic Grading does, is not "magic" or "revolutionary" in terms of the process itself. It's all been done before, at least as far as I can tell from analyzing the action, but what it does bring to the table is a very unique approach to the user interface and in how quick it is to setup. Combined with a really interesting way of smoothing the envelope following in a pleasing manner (the 'Response' knob) which in term gives it a unique flavor. This in my book makes it valuable and good. It's not perfect for all situations like giving stuff "movement" or "glue" in a specific manner.. but it IS good for basic leveling of dynamic range and gives the user a lot of control over exactly where this is done and how (up, down expansion or compression).

If you want absolutely ultimate control, there's probably nothing that matches Melda Productions completely free transfer function and extremely robust detailed tailoring of the time constants. But it takes a lot of time to setup and time to master (to actually know what you are doing). 2nd best option for ultimate control is probably DDMF Comprezzore as it makes the creation of very program dependent attack and release possible with just a few knobs and gives you both feed forward and feedback to work with.

[hugoderwolf]

Hey all, the developer here. Thanks for discussing the product in detail, very interesting conversation!

I don't want to take over the discussion too much, but I'd like to point out one important thing:
From a DSP/algorithmic point of view, there is indeed not a lot of revolutionary magic. There are a lot of neat little details in the DSP that make it very elegant and musical, but even with much shittier DSP math the concept would probably still "somehow" work. In the end it's a machine that works out a variable gain based on a signal.

You can also achieve similar results if you stack a few compressors and expanders (using pen, paper, calculator and lots of patience). The point is: nobody would ever do that.

Have you ever seen a forum post, where someone would suggest using an upward expander, a standard compressor, and a downward expander in series, with a detailed recipe for working out the proper thresholds, ratios and gains depending on the source signal? What if some signals require a different combination of compressors/expanders? You'd go crazy pretty quickly with that approach, so you couldn't even find out if such a stack is beneficial to what you want to achieve.

Here's a neat video that demonstrates a typical workflow in Dynamic Grading for quickly coming up with a strong but punchy rough mix, without even listening to the mix bus, while also fixing some problematic sources along the way: