Curves Equator a "Soothe Killer" from Waves

[beingmf]

Still one of the best of all those tools is Sknote's Soundbrigade (latest version). Just tested it against all the potential contenders I could (i.e. that I had a demo available of), very unobtrusive, yet effective if you need it. Just sayin'.

[_gl]

important: thanks to another poster for pointing out that if you get horrible performance on AMD, it's actually because a Waves optimisation isn't turned on (this apparently also affects some of their other plugins). Run this, as administrator (right-click):

C:\Program Files (x86)\Waves\Data\Utilities\MKL_Optimization.exe

Click the button until it says 'enabled' (if you don't run as administrator, the setting doesn't change). reboot required.

on my 5950x in Reaper, my CPU utilisation at 96k went from 0.46x of a core to 0.08! it was pretty much unusable before. why Waves don't enable this automatically is a mystery.

[_gl]

the one thing I need from CurvesEQ is a zero-latency mode (ie. minimum phase option) for live use. TBT SpecCraft now has this, I hope Waves will follow suit. the 20+ms latency otherwise is only useful for mixing/mastering.

[simon.a.billington]

the one thing I need from CurvesEQ is a zero-latency mode (ie. minimum phase option) for live use. TBT SpecCraft now has this, I hope Waves will follow suit. the 20+ms latency otherwise is only useful for mixing/mastering.

You can't have AI and zero latency, it just doesn't exist, not yet anyway. It's too computationally intensive. Perhaps in a few years when computers are more capable and Neural Engines have been beefed up quite considerably.

Oversampling also causes latency too. The higher the oversampling the higher the latency. I don't know about AI algorithms, but I know that one is down to the mathematics. It needs to look at values ahead in time to provide decent quality upsampling. That just translates as latency at our end.

Likewise for the moment anything with "AI" in it is more than likely going to mean latency. Unless that AI element is some kind of offline precess that happens. As with Codex and its sample tagging and organising.

[Fornicras]

I already have Baby Audio's Smooth Operator and I'm not happy with it due to low number of nodes I was batting an eye for soothe2 but it's expensive. How do you think Equator compares to Soothe2?

[DCrown]

Waves Equator overshadows Soothe haha
And what a good and fair price!
As much as I love Waves plugins,
I will pass on this one, cuz I like all my mics and know how to use them and have more than enough eqs.

Bye, bye Soothe, you had your best days in the past lol

[Alexander_D]

Soothe - is still the king in this area.

[Dr.Gunjah]

Soothe is great with subtle settings but it starts sounding weirder and weirder the more you push it. For more extreme scenarios imho the best choice is zynaptiq unfilter. CurvesEQ is somewhere in the middle and for the sale price it is good value for money. However I won't buy it until they add a bypass button.
Then again if you need/want a tool like this, try Lens (free version) first. It sounds awesome - hands down one the best freebies out there. I bought the pro version because it was on sale for 12 bucks, but imho you get the magic with the free one already.