While these instruments will certainly benefit from its capabilities, it will prove hugely useful for electronic producers, too, adding dirt to rasping basslines, helping vocals cut through a mix, parallel-processing a drum group or even adding weight and warmth to a whole mix.
At a glance, you might consider Radiator a rock plug-in, perfectly suited to guitar, electric bass and drum sounds. The EQ is generous, offering a pleasingly musical response capable of significantly rounding out bass tones or adding clarity and brightness. The dials provided are input, output, treble, bass and mix, where you decide whether to use a completely wet output treatment or treat the input source in parallel by balancing between an unprocessed and processed blend. But this one has a 21st Century twist: you can dial the noise out altogether if you choose. Of course, such gain increase in hardware terms comes at a cost-plenty of noise-and this stage of Radiator is faithfully modeled, too. Cranked to the max, all of these dials could significantly increase volume, and SoundToys have pulled no punches with an emulation capable of similar brutality.
The original hardware offered five mono inputs with removable transformers, but its selling point was its incredible 97 dB of gain boost, achieved through a combination of the input stage, a two-band EQ and then a separate output gain control. SoundToys is among the most respected developers of such software, and the latest title to exit SoundToys' stable is Radiator, which models the input channel and EQ of the Altec 1567A tube mixer designed in the '60s. So it's no surprise that plug-ins emulating this side of vintage hardware have become popular. But as we know all too well, recorded music actually sounds good with the grit of analogue circuits, tubes, noisy pre-amps and warm valves. The '80s provided a solution via digital recording. Throughout the '60s and '70s, what some engineers craved more than anything was a transparent, pristine-sounding recording medium that bypassed the hiss of tape.
0 kommentar(er)
