Waves new - BB Tubes

[plexuss]

I don’t like auto gain. Real kit doesn’t have auto gain. When you turn up the gain, that drives the processors that follow, which is an integral part of how I mix. Auto gain destroys that.

Auto gain is snake oil, if you ask me.

It's always optional, right?

I like having the gain matched to me equal in and out, and BB Tubes is an excellent example of why. Turn up those controls - it sounds better! And then eventually it just starts sounding like distortion (sooner on Beast than Beauty). But the moment you gain-compensate, a good three-quarters of that early good stuff just vanishes towards placebo corner. Not saying it's doing nothing - it is - but it's a lot more marginal than I'd hoped. And when you push it, it sounds like a lot of other saturators. I had high hopes for Beauty in particular, but oh well.

So for me gain-compensation is the opposite of snake-oil, part of its job is to expose snake-oil.

Excellent and I agree. This is how I disqualified The God Particle for purchase - gain matched with dry it brought little to the table.

[sin night]

First, I should say that I can’t stand the “wow” kind of marketing (and same for the fomo sales)

With that said, I still bought this plugin. I can insert it on a drum bus, set beauty and beast around 30-40% each, raise the bass relief as required, lower the output to match rms (by ear) and it sounds close to the unprocessed material… but it’s just more glued, the transients don’t poke out uncontrolled and the overall peak level is lower.
I didn’t need another saturation / distortion plugin, but I found BB Tubes to be a quick and effective tool…

Just my two cents, of course!

[jinotsuh]

Gee that musta hurt, and bein' a Waves plugin to boot

Damn fine plugin by the way

[becseigy]

nice review

[briefcasemanx]

...except the added Aliasing & IMD exponentially building up.

Exponentially?

[pixel85]

I couldn't hear anything special about this plugin and I couldn't understand the excitement here. Now I know why.
I hope that there will be more and more plugins like this one, ideally just a gain knob under a fancy GUI so I can read more comments from GAS addicts about how amazing those plugins are lol

[0degree]

nice review

Impossible! Greg Wells & Joe Chiccarelli are BLOWN AWAY

[jens]

Edit: wait, what? My previous post that explains why the Paul Third "test" (video posted here) got removed? Like seriously?

So here it (kind of) is again:

The plugin emulates tubes and tubes are highly non-linear devices. Thus the plugin's behaviour also is highly non-linear (plus frequency-specific).

To claim you could replace this plugin because you managed to replicate its result on pink noise of one certain level is pathelogically absurd.

No other signal is as immune to both non-linearity as well as frequency-specific behaviour as pink or white noise (well, pink noise may cause frequency-specific behaviour but not in a way you could possibly measure or even just observe).


Also it is absurd to claim the presets do not do anything audible when the "Sensitivity" control (gain compensated input gain) is set so low that the virtual tubes are barely distorting at all.

[jens]

Oh, something else: the claim that 2x, 4x and 8x oversampling are all the same is wrong. There is a clearly measurable difference between all three. In a quick test I did I just didn't manage to create enough aliasing that it would make an audible difference. And if the aliasing is low enough, it won't make a difference at all, of course. Again: this is all very much signal-dependent.

[sin night]

nice review

Reference to product image / ads + girls laughing + laugh onomatopoeia (in upper case, of course) + mocking title... looks quite a good example of how to make a clickbait video to me...

I saw one or two of his videos months ago and his channel went straight into my list of channels I won't watch again... Needless to say, I'm not going to watch this video. I don't want to increase his view count and, more importantly, I don't want to waste my time to watch something that I don't think is worthwhile.

Your mileage may vary, or course.


Anyway, the plugin does something. Maybe you could use other plugins / effects chains to get the same result, but this is a very quick tool, in a matter of seconds I can get the result I want and move on to the next thing. As I previously wrote, when I matched the levels (by ear, but I still did the effort to turn the output level knob while trying to keep the same loudness of the unprocessed signal...), I noticed that the peak level was lower. Should I say that with other words? It reduced the crest factor, so I could push the overall level a bit more before clipping (louder = better, right? )... of course BB Tubes is applying distortion to the track, but in a "pleasing" way (if I don't want to add distortion and change the tonal balance of the sound, I don't use something like BB Tubes!).


Of course people is free disagree, laugh and think I have insect ears and I should be banned (I think I qualify among those who praised the plugin, am I wrong?)... as much as I'm free to use the ignore list feature whenever I feel like to...

I actually can't stand the over the top way Waves is promoting it, it's really annoying. I often get the ads before watching a video on YouTube and everytime I have to mute it and press the skip button after 5 seconds... But then it's the result that counts. If a tool is worthwhile to you, then you'll buy it (regardless of the way it's marketed), otherwise you'll save your money for something else.
This is not a "must have" plugin in my book, but still something nice. Your mileage may vary.


And, just to make it clear, I really can't stand the ads for this plugin.


edit: it looks like mods are cleaning up the thread while I was posting this...

[jens]

Needless to say, I'm not going to watch this video.

He's sending low-level pink noise through it, leaves the Sensitivity-knob untouched, then complains that the plugin is barely doing anything audible.

[sin night]

I'm not an expert about signals and measurements, but if I were to do some measurements/tests on something meant to generate harmonics, I think I would use a sinusoidal tone in order to look for generated harmonics (and aliasing); I wonder what's the point of sending pink noise through a plugin like this...

If he's doing so (I won't watch the video), he's generating harmonics on a random signal that already contains all the frequencies and then he's summing those harmonics back to the original signal. Since the original signal has all the frequencies, the plugin will also generate harmonics on all the frequencies (with an amplitude of those harmonics controlled by the controls on the gui and the way the developers implemented the harmonics generation algorithm). And those new frequencies will be summed to the frequencies already present on the original signal, which have random phase by definition, so I expect they will sum or cancel in a random way.

I really wonder what (if any) meaningfult resul can provide a test like this. Seriously.

[sin night]

Just to clarify my previous post (technical subject + non native language = it's going to be a mess ).

Let's take a single frequency of that pink noise and let's call if "f". That pink noise already contains - by definition, also "2f" (the first harmonic of "f"). Each of this frequencies have a random, uncorrelated phase. The plugin will generate hamonics for "f" and "2f", to keep it simple we'll focus on the first harmonic generated from "f", which will be at "2f" (by definition of first harmonic) and will have a phase which is correlated to "f"... but, since we can't say nothing about the phase of the "2f" frequency on the original signal, when the "2f" harmonic is summed to the "2f" frequency of the original signal, the result can be constructive (add) or destructive (cancellation) and of course depends on the amplitude of the generated "2f" harmonic.

Of course this is repeated for every frequency present in the original signal (and since it's pink noise, it contains all the frequencies) and the sum is "more complex" because the plugin will generate also other harmonics after the first one... but I think it's still going to be a sum of frequencies with random phases.


And I'll also add that, unless the generated harmonics have enough amplitude to be comparable to the frequencies of the original signal (if "2f" on the pink noise and "2f" generated as a first harmonic of "f" have a comparable amplitude), the effect of the sum (or difference, depending on the phase angle) won't be much noticeable...


To wrap it up, I can't see any meaningful result from a test like this...


Just my 2 cents of course, I'm not an expert of these things, I'm just a programmer (and I work on business software, just to make it clear about my background) with a passion for technical /audio-related subjects.

[Scotty]

Paul Turd, yet another self proclaimed scientist with a fresh copy of plugin doctor. Looks inside a plugin and is shocked to see eq, clipping, gain and saturation instead of magic. He'd be amazing at car reviews. Imagine his disappointment if he found wheels and an engine? He does have the Beevis and Butthead laugh down to a science though.

[jens]

@sin night:

the most crucial point is that what the plugin does is non-linear and thus when sending in a static signal (leaving the frequency-spectrum aside for the now) you only see what it does at that level. There is two ways to increase the saturation/distortion:

1) raise the gain of the signal you send into the plugin - this leads to a louder output

2) turn up the plugin's Sensitivity knob - this won't affect the output gain

There is an LED that indicates how much the plugin is adding - it goes from green over yellow to red.

Green = it basically does nothing

Yellow = it is adding overtones on a very sutble level

Red = it full-on distorts the signal

If you look at what this causes with a spectrometer, you will notice that the overtone structure completely changes depending on the input-gain. Just as is the case with real tubes/valves.

With a normal signal you would of course see the LED constantly changing colour, but since pink noise is completely static, the LED colour will be static too, indicating that the amount of overtones the plugin adds is static too. When you look at the screen-grabs of BB Tubes Paul Third shows in his video, you will notice that the amount of saturation the plugin generates should be fairly subtle - which is exactly what he notices. BUT he obviously does not at all comprehend why that is. All the tries to increase the saturation is turning up the two big knobs. I gues for lads like him they should have made the Sensitivity know the biggest one.
He's just not getting it at all. And then he laughs about different presets not making an audible difference compared to each other.



All he would have to do is to turn up the Sensitivity knob and there would be quite a difference between the different presets. But all this obviously goes way over his head, yet there he is all smug and feeling so clever. The video really is a fail of the most epic-proportions because he's laughing all through the video feeling so superior while he is the one who is totally incapable of comprehending all this on the most basic level. And if you look at the comments praising him for this video you'll notice that there is an army of people who likewise don't get it. And this is us humans in a nutshell. This is exactly how conspiracy theories work. The conspiracy here is that Waves released a plugin that barely is doing anything (saturation-wise) with a broken OS code (the effect of which of course also totally depends on the present aliasing) and there is an army of famous, experienced engineers who praise it nonetheless, while the followers of the conspiracy-theory are all too clueless to even grasp how this thing actually works i.e. what it does and what it is supposed to do.

In other words: they do not understand at all what non-linearity means. But analog-modelling is all about non-linearity.

In a fair world, this post of mine would diminish Paul Third's reputation and influence in a way that he basically could stop making videos altogether - or rant about the weather or whatever instead of talking about stuff he doesn't have the first clue about and feeling all clever while doing so.