Ochre

There’s been a spate of plugins that have impressed me recently, and I’ve been demoing some of these to see if they’d replace any of my current software workhorses.

One of these is the virtual incarnation of Tube-Tech’s CL-1B compressor, coded by Swedish VST house Softube. The hardware version is very much a boutique piece of equipment costing a couple of thousand pounds, and while we’ve seen DSP emulations of specific outboard before from the likes of Universal Audio with their series of UAD-1 (and now UAD-2) plugins, convincing native emulations have been fairly thin on the ground, with only Waves really having a good go at pilfering the vintage audio ‘classics’ archive. Other plugins evoke vague vintage aesthetics with their ‘warm’ or ‘analogue’ switches, their careful virtual tarnishes, scratched and stained GUIs, but few have had the audacity to directly compete with their physical (and readily available) counterparts. But all this seems to be changing.

Now we’re seeing more officially sanctioned and licensed VST recreations of classic analogue gear—the analogue hardware fetish has spread to the virtual realm, enticing us with perfect photo-realistic renderings of the expensive hardware. In the case of the CL-1B VST, few of the usual advantages of software are present, apart from total recall and multiple instances. As far as I can tell, you can’t specify variables directly via keyboard input (as I like to do—I don’t especially like turning knobs with the mouse), there’s little feedback as to what value you’re dialling in, and of course the meter is a faithful, slow VU approximation of what’s really going on. It’s purely ears-only, and acts just like the hardware, or so I’m told. I don’t have a hardware CL-1B, which I’m sure will probably also be the case for 99% of buyers, so I have no idea how faithful the plugin sounds or behaves.

As for the sound, it’s not dissimilar to the UAD-1 LA-2A I already have, albeit more flexible, having control over the individual compression parameters (the release characteristics are a bit different though, dependent upon the different optical GR circuits between them). As a track compressor the CL-1B works superbly on similar material that suits the LA-2A. As a bus or mastering compressor I’ve had less success with it (again, like the LA-2A), preferring the PSP oldTimer for achieving results quickly (which can also sound quite similar at certain settings). Even with the fastest attack (.5ms), the CL-1B will let through a considerable amount of transients, meaning drums and program material will probably gain dynamic range using this compressor, whether you like it or not. Lacking a switchable high-pass sidechain filter, it also clamps down on bass frequencies too, which can take some of the weight out of kick drums. When attempting to be 100% faithful to the original, you’ll naturally have to also accurately model its shortcomings.

But the plugin does feature a separate sidechain input, meaning it is possible to set this up via a host supporting multiple inputs, such as Cubase, but as it’s not a VST3 plugin, you can’t simply send another filtered track to the sidechain. Instead you need to set up a four-channel group, sending the source channels to the first two of the group, and the sidechain channels to the last two of the group, and put your EQ of choice on the sidechain channel (I’ve tried using the Cambridge filters from 100-300Hz with variable HP slopes). In short, it’s a bit of a faff, especially when VST3 was created with multiple addressable I/O, to negate such needless faffing around. But it does sound brilliant, imparting a nice heft to the material, and means that in this state the CL-1B VST becomes much more useful for bus and mastering compression duties.

I’ll probably pass on buying the CL-1B for now, at least until the time comes to unshackle my UAD-1 cards, and the Magma case accommodating them, from my PC. But it’s definitely a first-rate VST compressor, that for me is only let down by the lack of internal sidechain filtering, as the manual workarounds mean I can’t use sidechaining in a host such as Wavelab (my mastering DAW of choice). Still, at the present rate of big hardware players entering the virtual market, it shouldn’t be too long before I go totally native (there’s even talk of an Elysia mPressor VST in the works!). Exciting times.

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Gear Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.