Neue Plugins sind rar gesäht – um so erfrischender, ein neues aber gleichzeitig altes Konzept zu sehen! Chris von Airwindows bringt mit ToVinyl einen Plattenschnittemulator in die Audio Unit Umgebung, der den Klang weicher, runder, eben Vinyl-artiger machen soll. ToVinyl ist kein Vinylizerprogramm mit Plattenknistern und Zerrer, sondern ahmt den Masteringprozess vor der Plattenproduktion nach.

ToVinyl is the processing you’d use for cutting vinyl records, whether that be high-end classical or slammin’ dub plates. I’m going to mention it in the mastering forum in case any of those guys use Logic or AUs, because the thing is, it is real- it’s not ‘from vinyl’ with fake rumble and stuff, it’s TO vinyl with elliptical EQ and highpass, and acceleration limiting.

I’ve checked it out extensively with SPAN during the design, and it seems to me it’s real good at that job- perhaps good to rival the amazing analog gear used for the purpose. The acceleration limiting can really catch high frequency energy, especially digital-sourced really high stuff, and sounds extremely good doing it.

And that turned out to be a secret weapon- like an immediately obvious, why-haven’t-I-done-this-before secret weapon. It turns out part of why vinyl sounds so good is the acceleration limiters. Here’s why.

When music grooves, it locks together and the transients combine. If it grooves really well you get a composite transient, but it can be over-busy, sonically tiring. When the acceleration limiters kick in, it blurs these instants (either poorly or well) and it sounds like the groove’s better- it ‘gels’ and combines the sensation of extreme accuracy with increased ease of presentation, and you get both a clarity and a relaxedness happening.

Something vaguely similar happens when you slam mixes into gross hypercompression, except it isn’t relaxing at all. Hmmm…

So the way ToVinyl works isn’t just for real mastering- it’s relevant to ALL music and indeed all sound. You increase ‘stereo bass cutoff’ to the extent that you want the shape of the soundstage to focus on the center. It goes really high but that’s just for aggressive dubplates and such… increase ‘mono bass cutoff’ to tighten the extreme lows, something that’s usually going to be useful simply because digital summing doesn’t do anything of the sort. The ‘gel’ control is ‘HF Limiter Sensitivity’. At zero it shouldn’t touch anything, then as you increase it, you start to ‘gel’ from the top down, starting with the very highest frequencies and increasing until it’s making things as dull as you want.

What you should do there is, increase it until it only begins to touch whatever treble area you want to retain. If there’s a tizz or digital highs on something like a vocal, you can neatly remove only that negative quality and leave everything else. If things have a sort of treble ‘aura’ that’s good but distracting, you can tweak the limiter until it sounds exactly the same but without the aura. ToVinyl is just killer at taking away undesirable qualities in the highs- and ITB mixing is loaded with those, by nature.

Hier gibt es das Demo, die Vollversion kostet 49$.