The Ever-Shrinking Divide between Hardware and Software
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009There’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.
Softube's emulation of the Tube-Tech CL 1B
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.
