Warmy EP1A Tube EQ

Nice Pultec variant! Sounds a bit better than Rare of AO... it's closest counterpart, I suppose, is a PTEq-X of Ignite Amps.

Very nice, free Pultec-plugin. I already got the Waves EQP-1A one at the point where I found this, but I have to say that I often think this free plugin does more fit to a particular sound than the Waves one.

Waves one is pretty profound, fat in sound, huge character (since it is boosting a lot the output also a little distortion) where the Warmy EP1A does it job more transparent and clean, especially vers 2. (more to that in a minute)

Advantages::

1. Input and Output Gain control.
2. Oversampling up to 16x (Waves EQP-1A does not offer oversampling at all).
3. Undo/Redo-buttons (for quicker workflow or in case your DAW can't do that on its own).
4. Resizable GUI.
5. Presets (even more in version 2.).

Disadvantages:
Although I really like the plugin, there are a few things I complain about (despite giving a 5 star rating for its sound and features in general):

1. The dials are very touch-sensitive in comparison to other plugins; that means using the dial can make you jump over many values just with a short and quick movement of your mouse. You can hold down CTRL or CMD to step over the parameter values more precisely, but this isn't so handy and comfortable if you just want to dial in some rough values.
2. You cannot type in the parameter value. Especially in conjunction with 1.) it can be hard to quickly adjust a parameter to a desired value. I prefer the Waves Pultec for this feature.
3. Values are too small and hard to read. Yes, the GUI is resizable to 175%, which is great, but the values keep small even if I make the interface hilariously large.
4. (Not really a complain but...) I would like to have a mixing control (either a simple one-knob or two individual ones fore dry and wet) back into the plugin, to adjust the dry and wet signal like the Waves EQP1-A in the V14 version has.

Version 1 vs. 2:
They updated the plugin to vers. 2 now (August 2022), which is BTW very cool from a developer to even update their free software. They said it is modelled even more to the hardware now then it was in vers. 1 and the sound is indeed very different between both versions.

In direct comparison and with equal setttings, Version 1 sounds way more mushy and more diffuse (It sounds almost like you even would add reverb - maybe due to the implemented tube saturation) than version 2. The difference is really huge.

Version 2 delivers a very, very clear sound (maybe because of the filter resonce is set higher - I don't know), and even reminds me of a "in-your-face" OTT (that multiband-compressor from Xfer) sound, when turned up.

So you even have a big difference between both versions of Warmy EP1A now. Version 1 is still downloadable alongside the Version 2 files and you can have both installed in your plugin library at the same time because they got different names and different architectures.

The dial "Tube Mix" to dial in an amount of tube saturation is no longer available in vers 2., but it was a kind of obsolete feature in vers 1. because it actually reduced the dry volume alongside giving the tube saturation effect. But I actually liked the unique idea of adjusting the tube part of the signal. Would be great to bring that feature enhanced back in, in an up-coming version.

Unfortunately, Vers. 2 is VST3-only. But I bridged it by using vst2shell and so it works in my setup with Live 9.7.

Great plugin.
Thank you very much for reading.

(And for the developer: Would be very nice if you can adapt many of the suggestions in vers. 3 if there will be one, one day).

Robert.

I use this all of the time. This and Rare by Analog Obsession. And I really can't say which one that I use more. Fun little copy of a copy of a piece of hardware, very usefull.