Black

Black is an Acqua plugin suite composed of two free players that focus on gain staging in a big way. The standard version of the Black plugin is powerful and impressive on its own, and the Black Guru plugin takes analog recreation to a whole new level. Several additional Volumes containing commercial banks and libraries are available.

Black: Authentic Analog Sound Recreation

The goal when designing Black was to offer two simple, easy-to-use players that would bring even more life to our preamp emulations, and at the same time handle filtering and saturation intuitively. Black makes gain staging in the digital domain a breeze by finding the optimal gain levels while keeping the source in perfectly balanced range, and distortion levels under control. Pro audio engineers looking for exacting, precise results will hear the difference in their mixes right away.

What's the Idea Behind Black?

The basic concept behind Black is to recreate in the digital domain that warm tone and rich feeling that an analog setup is capable of delivering.

Samples and recordings are usually distributed with 0dbFs, while user processors require an operational level of around -18dbFs. This means that prior to mixing in the analog world, it is quite important to send the correct amount of pre-amplification to your signal, as the rest of the chain depends on it.

With this in mind, Black should be the first plugin to add to the channels of your DAW: just set the input signal level using both the meters and the overflow LED. By increasing the input gain you will also affect harmonic distortion, just like on a real mixer. Then you can use the filters to eliminate any unwanted rumble in the low end/or and useless content in the top end, and then experiment with the different preamplifications until you find the one that adds just the right "color" to your source. "

The wide variety of preamp emulations offered in this plugin suite offers you the ability recreate the non-linearity that's characteristic of deep, open mixes — just like on a real analog piece of hardware.