Fabfilter Pro-Q 4!

[VitaminD]

My Q2 to Q3 upgrade price was $67.10 so while Q4 is only 23 dollars more, it is still a bit steep to me. Because $67 was on the high side for an upgrade imo really. Oh well..

[HOTF]

90$ CAD +tx for the upgrade, OUCH! I will resist for now ... The update looks nice and all but at the end of the day it's an EQ plugin it's not going to inspire me to make more music wich is what matters for me.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

I've got a $63 upgrade price, but I just don't care enough about anything they added or improved here to be seriously tempted. The instance view is kind of neat. Everything else feels kind of gimicky. If I need resonance suppression, I'll use a plugin that specializes in that. If I need saturation mojo, I'll use a plugin that specializes in that. And I just tend to reach for EQuilibrium and CraveEQ first as-is, and I don't see anything here changing that.

Someone early in the thread was hoping for hardware-inspired curves. I think that would've been much more up my alley. Dave Gamble's been working on other stuff, but something like EQuilibrium's hardware-based curves combined with good saturation modeling (which is a weak point for Fabfilter IMO), would've been interesting. A product that combines the best parts of ProQ3, EQuilibrium, TDR SlickEQ would be something that gets me using less plugins on tracks. Which is what I'd want.

Anyway, I'm just quite underwhelmed. I would've been much more into a ProMB update or updates to ProG and ProDS. Like, ProG with a higher latency "Noiseprint Mode" and newer style GUI would be worthwhile. Or bringing ProMB up to the level of ProC. This feels more like ProQ3.5 to me.

[jtsterays]

I've got a $63 upgrade price, but I just don't care enough about anything they added or improved here to be seriously tempted. The instance view is kind of neat. Everything else feels kind of gimicky. If I need resonance suppression, I'll use a plugin that specializes in that. If I need saturation mojo, I'll use a plugin that specializes in that. And I just tend to reach for EQuilibrium and CraveEQ first as-is, and I don't see anything here changing that.

Someone early in the thread was hoping for hardware-inspired curves. I think that would've been much more up my alley. Dave Gamble's been working on other stuff, but something like EQuilibrium's hardware-based curves combined with good saturation modeling (which is a weak point for Fabfilter IMO), would've been interesting. A product that combines the best parts of ProQ3, EQuilibrium, TDR SlickEQ would be something that gets me using less plugins on tracks. Which is what I'd want.

Anyway, I'm just quite underwhelmed. I would've been much more into a ProMB update or updates to ProG and ProDS. Like, ProG with a higher latency "Noiseprint Mode" and newer style GUI would be worthwhile. Or bringing ProMB up to the level of ProC. This feels more like ProQ3.5 to me.

Finally.

[iTzPrime]

I find the upgrade to be absolutely incredible. The workflow improvement of having all instances at once is a lot faster than in competing products, the spectracal soothe competitor sounds great and more options for dynamic EQ are fine too.
The drawing curve works great as well, very nice if you have for example a kick drum and know than you want to boost and cut specific parts already
The saturation is meh, but I guess for better ones there is always Saturn. I bought it new with an EDU discount, but even without the Upgrade price isn't too steep given that one normally uses it on literally every project

[Andreya_Autumn]

- No drive knob for the saturation. Very dumb decision, what's wrong with a small knob? And the sound is nothing special which I expected.

- No oversampling for dynamic processors and saturation, bad.

In zero latency mode, switching it on adds 3 samples of latency. Which I'm sure means you're mistaken about the latter, they almost certainly do up/downsample.

And having tested it (using null and emphasis/de-emphasis tricks) pretty extensively for a while now, I gotta say the lack of a drive knob makes 100% sense to me.

First of all, the amount of saturation is influenced by the total amount of gain added by the bands. It will impact stuff outside what's being actively boosted too. You can hear this easily if you send in a 50Hz sine wave and then dial in 30dB of boost above 10k. Obviously the sine doesn't increase in level, but it does get more driven.

Subtle is an assymetrical shaper (not tanh-alike, more below), which can be seen in the fact that when driven it adds odd and even harmonics both, and also outputs DC offset (which is what creates the assymetry). And it's only subtle until it isn't! Once you get past a certain threshold it starts driving *hard* quite suddenly. That threshold being pretty high is a good thing, as this shaper sounds most useful (for the intended purpose here) when you're *not* up near that drastic change.

A drive knob would maybe lead to people to expect a more typical waveshaper sound, the most popular of which are tanh and other similar curves which have a more gradual onset of distortion. This is not good for that at all! I think it's intended to be approached more like a nice solid-state mixing desk. You know how those will sound kinda pleasant in a subtle way that you might not even notice much, until you hit them hard enough to get power rail distortion and it just goes *kprrghghfftsshk*? This is like that!

The warm mode seems to have a similar shape but perhaps less steep at that threshold. Definitely the threshold is lower. And the assymetry behaves differently, maybe it's even level-dependent? Not sure. A bit less friendly with this one so far, but we'll see.

Someone mentioned aliasing. I didn't notice any problematic amounts in my tests. I didn't deliberately try to provoke it though.

Also several folks said they didn't find this feature very special. I guess I see why, and it's clear that this is super subjective. I found the subtle version did very pleasant (and not very subtle!) stuff to the treble on a drum bus. Had to be careful when boosting lows though, lest the loudest kicks would explode. So my conclusion is on a subtle bus EQ that doesn't need to boost very much, I'll for sure engage this and listen if I like it.

[Ploki]

I mentioned aliasing, but you’ll only trigger it if you go to *kprrghghfftsshk*

Not sure how they antialiased with 3 samples because it doesn’t screw up phase and 3 samples isn’t enough for linear phase filter

[VitaminD]

I mentioned aliasing, but you’ll only trigger it if you go to *kprrghghfftsshk*

Phew! I know well enough to never go *kprrghghfftsshk*

Sometimes *kprrghg* and maybe a little *fftss* but never *kprrghghfftsshk*

[Digivolt]

If they had released it at the start of Black Friday and for around £50 I would have jumped on it and while I could afford the £72, it's just not shiny enough a featureset to tempt me when like others, I already have specialist plugins that focus on most of the updated features, so probably going to wait until a sale in 2025

[vitocorleone123]

Instant upgrade for me. Could’ve cost full price and it’d be worth it. I don’t really like or use very many EQs except ProQ.

Very happy with the features. The spectral feature alone warrants the new version.

Yeah I have the sonible one but would be happy to not use their stuff.

Surely ProC2 and ProMB will be upgraded sooner rather than later now.

[jtsterays]

- No drive knob for the saturation. Very dumb decision, what's wrong with a small knob? And the sound is nothing special which I expected.

- No oversampling for dynamic processors and saturation, bad.

In zero latency mode, switching it on adds 3 samples of latency. Which I'm sure means you're mistaken about the latter, they almost certainly do up/downsample.

And having tested it (using null and emphasis/de-emphasis tricks) pretty extensively for a while now, I gotta say the lack of a drive knob makes 100% sense to me.

First of all, the amount of saturation is influenced by the total amount of gain added by the bands. It will impact stuff outside what's being actively boosted too. You can hear this easily if you send in a 50Hz sine wave and then dial in 30dB of boost above 10k. Obviously the sine doesn't increase in level, but it does get more driven.

Subtle is an assymetrical shaper (not tanh-alike, more below), which can be seen in the fact that when driven it adds odd and even harmonics both, and also outputs DC offset (which is what creates the assymetry). And it's only subtle until it isn't! Once you get past a certain threshold it starts driving *hard* quite suddenly. That threshold being pretty high is a good thing, as this shaper sounds most useful (for the intended purpose here) when you're *not* up near that drastic change.

A drive knob would maybe lead to people to expect a more typical waveshaper sound, the most popular of which are tanh and other similar curves which have a more gradual onset of distortion. This is not good for that at all! I think it's intended to be approached more like a nice solid-state mixing desk. You know how those will sound kinda pleasant in a subtle way that you might not even notice much, until you hit them hard enough to get power rail distortion and it just goes *kprrghghfftsshk*? This is like that!

The warm mode seems to have a similar shape but perhaps less steep at that threshold. Definitely the threshold is lower. And the assymetry behaves differently, maybe it's even level-dependent? Not sure. A bit less friendly with this one so far, but we'll see.

Someone mentioned aliasing. I didn't notice any problematic amounts in my tests. I didn't deliberately try to provoke it though.

Also several folks said they didn't find this feature very special. I guess I see why, and it's clear that this is super subjective. I found the subtle version did very pleasant (and not very subtle!) stuff to the treble on a drum bus. Had to be careful when boosting lows though, lest the loudest kicks would explode. So my conclusion is on a subtle bus EQ that doesn't need to boost very much, I'll for sure engage this and listen if I like it.

You're right about the saturation, it does oversample (I just PD it), but the dynamic EQ and soothe setting don't use oversample. Saturation influenced by band gain, that's good even though the sound is still mediocre to me, at least they didn't just use a static waveshaper. But it's still definitely a waveshaper just for the fact that the CPU is too low. The purpose for the drive knob is to finetune the amount of the saturation, different people gainstage differently. And I don't get the SSL desk part, in order to drive the desk you have to turn up the preamp knob or vol slider, I don't think there's pop up futuristic screen like in those Iron Man movies no?

[Andreya_Autumn]

I mentioned aliasing, but you’ll only trigger it if you go to *kprrghghfftsshk*

Not sure how they antialiased with 3 samples because it doesn’t screw up phase and 3 samples isn’t enough for linear phase filter

Right. That's forgivable IMO, since off-the-power-rails levels of murderation seem outside the intended use case here.

How do you know it doesn't screw up phase? Plugin Doctor? 3 samples should be enough for a downsampling stage with a filter whose phase distortion would be negligible when you're adding that non-linearity anyway, was my thought. But of course, we can only speculate.

Point is I think there's nothing wrong with their implementation if you use it for the subtleties it was intended for. If you want your kick to go from *Tthoowp* to *KshhÄÄshht* you should probably look elsewhere!

[Andreya_Autumn]

You're right about the saturation, it does oversample (I just PD it), but the dynamic EQ and soothe setting don't use oversample. Saturation influenced by band gain, that's good even though the sound is still mediocre to me, at least they didn't just use a static waveshaper. But it's still definitely a waveshaper just for the fact that the CPU is too low. The purpose for the drive knob is to finetune the amount of the saturation, different people gainstage differently. And I don't get the SSL desk part, in order to drive the desk you have to turn up the preamp knob or vol slider, I don't think there's pop up futuristic screen like in those Iron Man movies no?

Seems like even the fastest dynamic EQ settings don't go fast enough to distort very much. So probably oversampling that would've been overkill. At least I guess that's their reasoning.

And yeah I know how a desk works, and what gain staging is. I'm also sure that FF do too, so clearly they made a conscious decision here. And my guess is the reason for their choice is they don't want to encourage people to think about this tool that way. And I can kinda see why, if the drive control were there it would be very tempting to bring it into the "distinctly audible" range which as noted above is kinda precarious/unwieldy and clearly not the intended use case here. "You probably want this one to not drive very much anyway" is the message I get, kinda. But I'm just guessing of course.

[Andreya_Autumn]

Anyway, awesome update! Those continuous slopes are impressive, super cool addition. Allpasses are gonna be hyper-useful (any second now Dan is gonna drop a video using those for something mindblowing lol). All the workflow improvements are great. Very nice.

[unpeople]

For me it was 59.10€ incl. 19% VAT.

I got my Pro-Q 3 in early 2019. Considering that Pro-Q 3 was released in late 2018, just over 6 years ago, that's less than 10€/year. Acceptable, I think.

I got my Pro-Q 3 at the end of April, and my upgrade price, not even eight months later, is $63. Not acceptable.