Soundtoys Echoboy

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Oof. This underscores why a lot of this is all personal preference. I've personally found Valhalla interfaces to put too much emphasis on rarely-used parameters (sometimes at the expense of hiding more-likely-to-be-useful-parameters), and the overall appearance to be ugly and painful to look at. Ubermod being a prime example.

Regardless of what parameters they chose to display or the "overall appearance being ugly," which are opinions, the Valhalla GUI's are easy to see/read. I think that part is hard to dispute. They are 1) resizable, 2) have very readable fonts, 3) knob and fader positions are legible at distances, and 4) there's sufficient contrast throughout. At first I thought the Valhalla UI's looked like children toys or something, but after years with them, they're among my absolute favorite because they're just easy to work with due to how clearly legible everything is.

If you don't have great eyesight, or the right lighting conditions, or the right-size monitor or resolution, Echoboy can be difficult to work with because it's hard to see thinks like knobs and their values by quickly glancing at the GUI. I have 20/20 vision but still find that Echoboy requires a little bit more effort to get a handle on the parameter values due to small UI elements and lack of overall contrast. Echoboy Jr. is much better in this regard. I think even Soundtoys recognizes this, hence why they changed the look for Echoboy Jr.

My guess is that Echoboy and some of the older SoundToys plugins will get GUI updates before we see a SoundToys v6. I have nothing to base that on other than Echoboy Jr. having a different look, but it just seems like an obvious update to some of those older plugins. Remember, when those plugins were designed, screen resolutions were in a very different place than they are today. There was no such thing as UHD monitors. Echoboy would be completely useless to me in Studio One (which doesn't scale plugin GUI's) if I had my laptop set to it's native 4k resolution. 4k monitors wouldn't have even been a consideration when it was originally designed.

[m03]

which are opinions

...which is exactly what I stated at the beginning of my comment:

This underscores why a lot of this is all personal preference. I've personally found Valhalla interfaces

That aside, I agree that the font choice and scaling is useful.

[dreamvoid]

There's nothing at all respectful about your comments regarding Soundtoys or Echoboy in these past two pages.
You just sound like an immature and aggressive person who tries, and fails, to justify his rude outbursts.

No doubt you'll find it just as humorous if someone gives you, or one of your family members, a 'slap' in the future...

haha ... must be a cultural thing, maybe even the appreciation of fiddly, crappy GUIs. But lets stay on topic with the GUIs. People tend to judge things from their narrow perspective. I remember talking to a developer why the fonts in his GUI are so tiny and he admitted he was doing all programming with low DPI on a notebook and never thought further. That is the reason why people studying these things. Reflective screen surfaces are not seen as ergonomic either, although people are buying these - sometimes there is not alternative anymore. IMO work has to be done with ergonomic tools and SoundToys did mistakes for whatever reasons. Probably they thought it looks cool and is good for marketing, I don't know. The GUI is for me an extreme example of doing things wrong and I'm interested in using the stuff I payed for in creative work. That's all.

[rod_zero]

Soundtoys have shown they can do better GUIs, Jr for example, little alterboy.

Echoboy is quite old and it is not even on par with other newer soundtoys plugins GUI wise, they have to update the GUI.

Replika XT and Relayer have excellent GUIs.

As for tape delays I think Satin is the king as far as sounding as tape.

[valhallasound]

Oof. This underscores why a lot of this is all personal preference. I've personally found Valhalla interfaces to put too much emphasis on rarely-used parameters (sometimes at the expense of hiding more-likely-to-be-useful-parameters), and the overall appearance to be ugly and painful to look at. Ubermod being a prime example.

I like the appearance of ÜberMod. The idea was something that could be screen printed using only a few colors.

As far as too much emphasis on rarely used parameters in ÜberMod, I agree with you. The hierarchy of sliders vs tabbed knobs made sense to me in 2011, but I would do it differently in 2017. Honestly, I lean towards having ALL parameters on the top level of the GUI in 2017, even it that means reducing the number of parameters.

Sean Costello

[wormfingers]

Honestly, I lean towards having ALL parameters on the top level of the GUI in 2017, even it that means reducing the number of parameters.

Sean Costello

Amen to that. I like to map my plugins to a MIDI controller and having most parameters visible is a plus. I love VVV for that, and use it on most of my tracks. I get immediate visual feedback while using a controller.

[wagtunes]

Demo with Soundtoys Echoboy, Crystallizer, LittleRadiator and Microshift. Sound source Softube Modular. Before and after. First sound is no FX. Second sound is with all FX.

https://soundcloud.com/steven-wagenheim/soundtoys-demo

I just tossed stuff on the patch. I can only imagine what I can get this stuff to sound like with any thought at all.

[m03]

Honestly, I lean towards having ALL parameters on the top level of the GUI in 2017, even it that means reducing the number of parameters.

Sounds wonderful.

[street spirit]

no i agree with the op, the gui is shiet.
The knob controls are way to sensitive, and jerky, you know when the graphics and mouse feel suck on a plugin. Dont need to be modest.
I have Tremolator, LIttle PLate, and recently purchased Filter Freak.
Almost unusable and uninspiring to use, but sound pretty decent, worth the 29$ i payed.
Wouldnt fork over 159$ for it , hell no Lol

[Delta Sign]

Oof. This underscores why a lot of this is all personal preference. I've personally found Valhalla interfaces to put too much emphasis on rarely-used parameters (sometimes at the expense of hiding more-likely-to-be-useful-parameters), and the overall appearance to be ugly and painful to look at. Ubermod being a prime example.

I like the appearance of ÜberMod. The idea was something that could be screen printed using only a few colors.

As far as too much emphasis on rarely used parameters in ÜberMod, I agree with you. The hierarchy of sliders vs tabbed knobs made sense to me in 2011, but I would do it differently in 2017. Honestly, I lean towards having ALL parameters on the top level of the GUI in 2017, even it that means reducing the number of parameters.

Sean Costello

While I think that's a great approach for many things, I also really like the ultimate control nerdiness of Ubermod. Ubermod wouldn't be what it is if it would be reduced to a few parameters.

And just to add to the Gui opinion discussion: Valhalla Guis are by far my favorites in the plugin world. They may not look "fancy" (although I think they are beautiful), but they are amazing to work with on a daily basis.

[alexpander]

Echoboy is another plugin that has been the industry standard for years, because it's sounds fantastic - but it doesn't do its job very well (and nobody seems to bother, again). The timing of the delays is simply wrong. It is not even possible to create a simple quarter note echo without the timing floating all over the place. Just give it a try with the default settings - bounce it down, view it on the grid and compare to your stock delay plugin. Please report this to Soundtoys so it won't need 5 years again until such devastating bug is fixed.

[Richard deHove]

The old Soundtoys GUIs are very average. Not the worst certainly, but far from the best. As stated above they have shown they can do reasonable GUIs (Jnr) but seem disinclined to take much action. The whole Soundtoys operation feels very low-wattage and disinterested to me.

[yellowmix]

The timing of the delays is simply wrong. It is not even possible to create a simple quarter note echo without the timing floating all over the place. Just give it a try with the default settings - bounce it down, view it on the grid and compare to your stock delay plugin. Please report this to Soundtoys so it won't need 5 years again until such devastating bug is fixed.

I'm sorry, but this is just silly. The default preset is set to "Studio Tape" and nearly every model has some sort of intentional timing imperfection. Set style to Digital Delay, and try it again.

[alexpander]

The timing of the delays is simply wrong. It is not even possible to create a simple quarter note echo without the timing floating all over the place. Just give it a try with the default settings - bounce it down, view it on the grid and compare to your stock delay plugin. Please report this to Soundtoys so it won't need 5 years again until such devastating bug is fixed.

I'm sorry, but this is just silly. The default preset is set to "Studio Tape" and nearly every model has some sort of intentional timing imperfection. Set style to Digital Delay, and try it again.

Dude, I 've been using Echoboy for over 10 years and I know exactly how it behaves. It took 3 years until someone believed me that the first Echoboy VST versions didn't report any latency to the DAW and therefore timing was already then completely a mess. So please don't call me silly.

But if I do something wrong, I like to be taught a better way. It's not about complaining - I just want the tools to do what they're made for.

But especially for you: "Digital Delay" with all modulation and shifting parameters set to "off" compared to Waves H-Delay and Ableton's Simple Delay (just a simple quarter note delay):

[yellowmix]

Dude, I 've been using Echoboy for over 10 years and I know exactly how it behaves. It took 3 years until someone believed me that the first Echoboy VST versions didn't report any latency to the DAW and therefore timing was already then completely a mess. So please don't call me silly.

But if I do something wrong, I like to be taught a better way. It's not about complaining - I just want the tools to do what they're made for.

But especially for you: "Digital Delay" with all modulation and shifting parameters set to "off" compared to Waves H-Delay and Ableton's Simple Delay (just a simple quarter note delay):

I was not calling you silly, I was calling the assertion you made silly. You asserted EchoBoy's timing "floats all over the place", using the default preset, set to "Studio Tape", as an example, when it is supposed to fluctuate.

Here is a test done with EchoBoy in Digital Delay mode, using Cubase. I placed a modified Dirac impulse at 8th notes. It is constructed to have a maximum positive sample at the beginning and a maximum negative sample at the end. It is exactly 0.1 ms long (48 samples) at a sample rate of 48000 Hz.

The left channel is the impulse placed at 8th notes for two measures. The right channel is the 100% wet Echoboy set to maximum feedback in order to measure cumulative timing deviation.

Through the two measures, EchoBoy's timing is consistent. There is a difference from the perfect DAW timing, of 8 samples. It's always 8 samples. That is .016 ms. I understand this may be undesirable in specific cases but it is well within tolerance of modelling an 80s digital delay.

If you want a perfect delay, you have your stock delay. If you want to model delays, that's what EchoBoy does, and it does it well.

echoboytest.PNG

Here is the complete WAV file: http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fi ... 2721626820