Curves Equator a "Soothe Killer" from Waves

[jens]

As soon as I saw the clickbait title I knew it had to be a youtuber..

Yeah, I never made the same mistake twice to click on one of his video-links...

[bmanic]

Agreed. It's quite annoying that some of these youtubers have infested KvR.

Isn't it technically against the rules? I know Frankie here tries to be really careful nowadays but he is still just fishing for views. It doesn't help much either that the few videos I've accidentally stumbled upon his channel are rather poor in quality.

[kidslow]

I would recommend trying DERES from WA. The stuff from that particular lineup is not the same quality as the typical stuff WA has been known for. They are working with an engineer who knows his stuff to develop them.

He might know his stuff, but he suffers from the same What About problem that many of their plugs do, failure to fix bugs and update. After all the hype I read about Deres, I did a demo.

There was, unknown to me then, a bug reported on GS in May about typed in values not obeying the input but just jumping to the max value, and acknowledged by the dev. months before my trial. It created a very unpleasant experience when I typed in +6 for out volume and it instead went to +24. Ouch. And afaik still not fixed. My post asking about the update was not even acknowledged, and the developer was very active in that thread once.

Acon Equalize gives me a perfectly usable notch filter with adjustable Q, and delta, that I can sweep, all as easy as Deres, and as many of them as I might want (up to 12). One of those times I'm scratching my head about the hype. And I know Acon is trustworthy and will update their tools. For dynamic de-resonance, I turn first to TDR Nova.

[foosnark]

I have an album almost ready to master, and one particular song has a bit of an obnoxious resonance at a particular spot.

Soothe is probably the better tool for this, and maybe better yet would be Master the Mix's RESO.

Are these your productions, meaning you have access to the individual tracks? Obviously the best place to deal with this. Otherwise automating Soothe or RESO in the offending spot will probably give you a better result than these dynamic EQ tools.

My own production, but the way I work (with a blend of hardware and software) is to record the stereo mix of improvisations in real time, rather than individual stems or submixes. Then sometimes I overdub. That would probably drive some folks crazy but I find it easy to work with and to keep myself moving forward rather than looking back or second-guessing my choices. Only once in a while do I wish I could isolate a particular part.

I had Gullfoss and returned it for a refund, and I've demo'd Soothe and didn't really find it better than TEOTE.

If you have one particular problematic frequency poking out every once in a while, I highly recommend just using a good low-ringing EQ like EQuilibrium and notch out the frequency until it doesn't bother any more.

Soothe and other similar tools are not optimal for that particular job. A single narrow EQ band will be much better at the task, at least in mastering

Yep. An automated fix for stuff like that would be a handy lazy shortcut if it did work well, though

Anyway, decided to go ahead with Equator since it seems to be working well as a general "sound nicer" sort of thing and the intro price is OK.

...also either there were features I didn't notice this morning, or registering it unlocks more controls. I honestly don't remember a Sensitivity control on it this morning, and Mid/side balance under "Advanced Controls" is very nice to have.

[noiseboyuk]

From the official walkthrough, it seems to me a bit more like Sonnox Claro than Soothe:

[kraster]

From the official walkthrough, it seems to me a bit more like Sonnox Claro than Soothe:

It's very much more like soothe with a side order of trackspacer and a hint of Mspectral dynamics. I have Soothe, Claro and Equator and a bunch of other. Claro is basically an EQ. It's not even dynamic. It's probably closest to ProQ3 but ProQ3 has dynamic EQ.

By default Equator is a resonance suppressor. Just drag the threshold down and it automatically hunts for resonances. Like DSEQ and Soothe when you manipulate the curve nodes you're effectively adjusting the threshold of the suppressor.

It's inverted in Equator ie. lower curves give less compression whereas in DSEQ and Soothe you're pushing the selected frequency into the suppressor making it more sensitive to that range.

It becomes more like Trackspacer when you use the sidechain to drive the detection and have it in Ride mode. The similarity with Mspectral dynamics is being able to have a threshold that is derived from the signal itself.

The Autogain feature in equator is probably the only feature that is comparable to Claro.

Ultimately Soothe seems more refined and seems to zone in on trouble spots more accurately. I prefer what Soothe does to the Midrange (which is often where the most troublesome resonances are) but Equator seems better at tackling low mid/low end mud and is not far behind soothe overall.

I think Equator is very good and a decent alternative to Soothe particularly when you consider the price difference.

[noiseboyuk]

Well from the demo video it seems most focused on clarity in a mix, esp using the sidechain to avoid clashing frequencies. This is what Claro does.

[martinjuenke]

Waves

[simon.a.billington]

I actually don't' own Soothe. I've actually been holding off from investing in yet another developer in hopes that one I've already invited in will make something similar.

In order to curb my GAS spending problem I limit who I buy from. It's a method that has actually worked quite well for me, so I wasn't about to break it any time soon. I'm actually glad it turned out to be Waves who did it in a sense, because I already have a subscription which suddenly makes that en even more worthwhile investment.

It seems to me that Waves took it an extra step or two further though, as it does things that Soothe doesn't actually do. Useful things too... Not that I'm devaluing Soothe in any way.

[billinder33]

In order to curb my GAS spending problem I limit who I buy from.

Yeah, same here. These days a plugin needs to solve some kind of problem that I can't solve with an existing vendor's tool. The less places I have to download from for new system installs, the better.

[fisherKing]

i used to use soothe 2, but had some problems running it with izotope ozone 8 (?); now ozone 11 covers that ground anyway.

having said that... waves curves equator is pretty nice, am demoing it now (and cheap enough to just add to the arsenal anyway).

EDIT: bought. it's really good, and finding a lot of use for it...

[simon.a.billington]

In order to curb my GAS spending problem I limit who I buy from.

Yeah, same here. These days a plugin needs to solve some kind of problem that I can't solve with an existing vendor's tool. The less places I have to download from for new system installs, the better.

Yeah thats what I think too.

It's also what I liked about Plugin Alliance back in the early days. It was a one stop place where I could get plugins modelling real world hardware, and a few other things. It's all there in the one place. No need to chase the individual developers all over the web.

[SiliconDeath]

At that price it's a no-brainer imo. It's probably not perfect, but it gets close enough to the ballpark to be a good plugin to have in the kit. Well done Waves.

[simon.a.billington]

At that price it's a no-brainer imo. It's probably not perfect, but it gets close enough to the ballpark to be a good plugin to have in the kit. Well done Waves.

Nothing ever is perfect. Ever. Best we can do is hope to get close, but there will always be imperfections in life, in art and in our tools.

Everything is a trade off, the best thing we can hope for is that the pros far outweigh the cons. The way it appears at the moment, is that Curves Element does seem to check that box.

[swilow11]

Picked this up today and like it. I have Smooth Operator but feel like that colours things in a hard to define but apparebt way. Curve Equator doesn't seem to do this. I did notice pretty high CPU which is sort of annoying but think this will be a tool mainly for use in mixdown so no biggie. For this price, it was a pretty easy decision...