Three-Body Technology Cenozoix Compressor (Plugin Alliance)

[Fidimix]

TBTECH is becoming one of the only companies that compete with fabfilter.

[Ploki]

TBTECH is becoming one of the only companies that compete with fabfilter.

In what way are they competing with FabFilter?
They're not even targeting the same buyer.
People who buy into FabFilter buy into them because they need a bullet proof set of great-sounding tools with consistent and simple UX with top notch support, and they're willing to pay a hefty price for that.

TBTECH doesn't really do any of that and it's not the focal point of their marketing.

They do other things and that's fine.

Aside from the superficial appearance similarity (because TBtech ripped off fabfilter interfaces) they're not suited for same use-case scenarios in my opinion.
Comparing ProC2/ProQ3 with Cenozoix/Kirchoff is like comparing Logic with Reaper - take what you will from that comparison.

[MJACau]

I do like TBTECH's stuff, I think their strongest plugin is Cabinetron. Nothing comes close in multi IR management and manipulation.

[jens]

There's quite an interesting video here:

https://youtu.be/_67aaKKNPpI?si=tyVvS9U15UOHgbaP


Personally I love these kind of smokelifter videos. A bit of reason to counter the dopamin-induced praise-craze (looking at you bmanic ) is certainly no bad thing.



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[martinjuenke]

There's quite an interesting video here:

https://youtu.be/_67aaKKNPpI?si=tyVvS9U15UOHgbaP


Personally I love these kind of smokelifter videos. A bit of reason to counter the dopamin-induced praise-craze (looking at you bmanic ) is certainly no bad thing.



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There's a typo in your signature...

[jens]

yeah, I know, I know...

[bmanic]

There's quite an interesting video here:

https://youtu.be/_67aaKKNPpI?si=tyVvS9U15UOHgbaP


Personally I love these kind of smokelifter videos. A bit of reason to counter the dopamin-induced praise-craze (looking at you bmanic ) is certainly no bad thing.

Like he said, it's a click-bait title.. but what he doesn't say, or admit, is that it's a very clickbait video to begin with. Not very far from mr SnakeOil.

Unfortunately for the dude in the video, what he criticizes is sort of valid but what he doesn't seem to understand (nor does he explore it further!) is that for instance the attack and release program dependency changes as well! It's not just static linear attack and release values for all the models, _all_ of the program dependency changes per model under the hood as well. Thus because it is all program dependent, how do you decide what attack and release values are "correct"?

Personally I think TB Tech did the correct choices for it. They've done an adequate job enough to make switching between the various models intuitive enough. It could be much worse (as some companies have shown) but I agree that the threshold at least could be a bit more evenly matched. I don't agree with him that the values are deceiving. They are just generic values that we take for granted. However, I do think TBT could have gone with '%' instead of milliseconds or even the ratio being % based. Same critique I had for FabFilter Pro-C and Pro-L, where the values don't make much sense in terms of attack and release.

Heck, he could make kind of the same complaints about Pro-C2, though there the threshold and ratio are at least matched very well between the models.. but attack and release are wildly varying in program dependency and thus how they operate at the same values.

Also, the guy doesn't seem to realize that what he calls "aliasing" seems to be intermodulation distortion (those peaks that go all the way down to the low frequencies). Still, even I criticized the oversampling method TBT/Plugin-Allianced made such a fuzz about and hyped it as something revolutionary. It wasn't even working correctly in the first release version of the plugin, and now that it is, it's still rather lack luster in my opinion.

This is still an absolute beast of a compressor and definitely a "one stop shop" for extremely thorough compression tasks. The only thing it's missing, in my opinion, is something that is exceptionally clean. The mastering preset isn't on par with the FabFilter Pro-C mastering algorithm, TDR Kotelnikov or Massenburgs DRC2. It's useful but the intermodulation distortion isn't kept in check as thoroughly as some of these others.. or whatever is causing it to have a "sound" that is a bit forward (could be the program dependency being a bit too heavy handed).

[jens]

Yeah, well... I dunno, so far I have managed to resist testing it - but if the different models could be made significantly more similar sounding on a variety of different sources (which I have a hunch is indeed the case), then they should have done that - whether (again if thats the case in the first place) that then would have been done out of lazyness or a desire to make the differences more pronounced (which I indeed would call being deceptive), we of course don't know.

But I certainly get your point regarding program-dependency and think he should have used/shown different kinds of program material in order to come up with his analysis.

[Dirtgrain]

There's quite an interesting video here:

https://youtu.be/_67aaKKNPpI?si=tyVvS9U15UOHgbaP


Personally I love these kind of smokelifter videos. A bit of reason to counter the dopamin-induced praise-craze (looking at you bmanic ) is certainly no bad thing.

I wonder about this guy--seen him a number of times, and he seems like a shill. And his intonation patterns, clearly meant to be like a pro broadcaster, just sound absurd. You want to know what's wrong with TB Tech? Maybe they didn't pay him off?

[jens]

And his intonation patterns, clearly meant to be like a pro broadcaster, just sound absurd.

He's Swedish - that's just their typical ductus. You most probably wouldn't want to hear what I sound like (being German).

[Dirtgrain]

I've known many Swedes who are not at all obnoxious sounding like him, and he is way on an extreme, and he is surely trying to mimic the rise and fall of pros. But he gets the views, so what do I know?

My parents are German--no worries.

[bmanic]

I think his youtube channel is perfectly fine. His videos are mostly well done and to the point, demonstrating plugins effectively and usually quite thoroughly.

This is the first time I've seen him slip up a bit, going into the clickbaity stuff. Though I usually only check his plugin reviews for quick audio examples mainly. Just to see what is available and possibly worth investing some time in checking out.

@jens

You most definitely don't need this plugin at all. I know you have a bunch of compressor plugins already available. I mainly bought it just to slowly get rid of my Plugin Alliance GAS (I still have a bunch of those 1$ vouchers) and I happened to like the amount of control this compressor gives me. I thought I could make it my go-to for all basic compression tasks but the User Interface is kinda frustrating somehow. I really dislike how the only clean post gain and pan settings are in the top right corner of the plugin. I know, it's silly to get annoyed by such small things but hey that's me.. also, it's still rather buggy. I've had numerous crashes in projects where I have many instances of this particular plugin, though I haven't been able to pinpoint why and how it crashes. The vintage tube model is still broken and causes weird artifacts when you send it very low level audio signals (below -30dBFS).

Besides, after getting a Softube Console 1 mk3 I've forced myself to use that as my go-to for all mixing tasks (which I'm still struggling with!).

[Ploki]

Called it

[bmanic]

Indeed you did!

[v petero]

@bmanic If you’re no longer using this compressor, I can buy it from you.

Just demoed and I am thoroughly impressed with the speed at which I can achieve good results, even with the buggyness highlighted in this thread.

Regards

Kenneth