DQ5010

The Legend

This effect plugin is an emulation of the late 80's Dynamic Quantizer 5010 from Evectronic, famous for its floating-point digital architecture that gave it a very distinctive grain when quantization was applied to spare its limited storage and processing resources.
This machine is legendary... in that it never existed. But if it did this software would be its closest emulation.

What people could have said:

A machine the like of which the world has never seen the like of which.

Denholm Reynholm, Head of Evectronic
(seconds before jumping out of a window of its basement studio)

If you are tired of plugins that try to imitate old devices, and indifferent to plugins that struggle for innovation, then you might be interested in a plugin that does neither of these, yet is kinda both, or the opposite.

Sound Off Sound

Origins

The inspiration for this device came when studying the SP-1200 and developing the SP950 plugin: the SP does use a very crude pitch algorithm that was a perfect fit at the time for an 8 channels device in this price range and market target, and same goes for the ADC and DAC parts. Together with filtered outputs the artifacts and aliases were deemed perfectly acceptable for sampling drums. Memory was arguably large enough for one-shots so all was good: this is what good engineering is all about, performance at a price point. Except that this is not how the machine got to be used, and we know how things went from there.
This sequence is fascinating as it defeats both engineering and marketing logic: the SP emancipated from the hands of its creators to become a musical instrument in its own right.

This realization raised an idea: what kind of early digital device would have emerged if the industry was shaped differently? What kind of technical compromises would have been made if the trend toward floating-point arithmetic in audio had arose earlier, at a time where 32-bit would have been too heavy to process and store? What kind of artifacts would an early digital low precision floating-point device produce and what would engineering teams have to resort to to mitigate these limitation?

The DQ5010 plugin tries to really stick to this technical principle to be the accurate (re)creation of what such a machine could have sounded like. I hope you will enjoy its sound and raw temperament.

The Sound

The DQ5010 can be seen as a bitcrusher, but with a very distinctive behavior and sound due to its internal floating-point architecture. Unlike classic bitcrushers where low level signals tend to be buried in noise or distortion while high level ones remain comparatively unaffected, this architecture does preserve the full dynamic of the signal and affects every dynamic part of the signal evenly. The artifacts this produces are quite different and unique compared to any existing plugin or hardware device.

The DQ5010 can bring different types of sound depending on the settings and input signal:

• Mid quantization and low taming values will typically bring some nice grit to drums. Snares will usually require lower quantization values compared to kicks to get audible artifacts. This range of settings can also be used on vocals to bring some dusty/noisy effects reminiscent of old video game samples, or bad radio transmissions.
• When combined with the SP950 plugin upstream, or with SP-1200* samples, these types of settings can bring edginess to the rounded sound of the SP, and a different and complementary kind of grit.
• Low quantization values with high taming will tend to produce interesting low frequency distortion/saturation effects. Depending on the settings this can also be used to boost low frequencies based on their dynamic, or produce a dynamic stereophonic effect using the width functionality to give a feeling of space and movement while retaining mono compatibility.
• When combined with low-bypass it is possible to specifically address a snare or even a hi-hat in a drum loop, or the upper harmonics of a kick or bass.

Video: {See video at top of page}