Tops and Flops: Plugins, Pedals, and Platforms
This week's highlights in the world of audio.
In this week’s edition of Tops and Flops, we look at some of the most exciting and infuriating developments in the world of audio and music.
This Week’s Tops and Flops
Tops and Flops: Relab Development launches Maselec MLA-4 Plugin
If you’re familiar with Maselec’s ultra-high-end audio processing tools, you’re probably a professional mastering engineer. The MLA-4 is a nearly $8000 multiband compressor/expander that has been recreated as a plugin through the company’s collaboration with Relab Development.
Aimed at specialized mix bus processing and dynamics restoration, the MLA-4 uses three processing bands with variable crossover points, so you can target specific areas of your mix to add punch, remove harshness, or excite the high-frequency range. For making precise adjustments, there are independent left and right input gain controls, and the MLA-4 can easily be used in parallel.
Meanwhile, each of the three bands has controls for the threshold, attack, release, ratio (6:1 to 1:2), and makeup gain. The sidechain features of the MLA-4 are particularly interesting, as each band can expand and compress separately, with the sidechain linking functions and the boost function on the high band.
Tops and Flops: Meris Released a Monster Synth Pedal!
Pedal pioneers Meris introduced the Enzo X, a majorly expanded version of the Enzo polyphonic synth pedal. The Enzo X is controllable via instrument input or MIDI, so you can find a way to incorporate it into your setup as a guitarist, synth head, or DAW-focussed producer. Equipped with a 32-bit floating point internal DSP system running on ARM architecture, the Enzo X opens up a world of sound creation and processing capabilities.
It has five different synth modes, including mono, poly, and dry processing, as well as polyphonic pitch detection, to trigger notes and chords both accurately and expressively. What’s more, the color screen interface has been adapted from the LVX and MercuryX effects pedals.
With six voices of polyphony, selectable oscillator types (saw, triangle, and square) with cross modulation, as well as various filter types and amp and filter envelopes, you can shape sounds to your heart’s content. In addition, with MIDI CC control you can get hands-on with your favourite controller or send control messages from your DAW.
Tops and Flops: A Secret Weapon to Win the Loudness War?
Clipper plugins are very much in vogue at the moment in modern music production, especially in the world of dance music. If you haven’t yet caught the clipper bug, they are great tools for ensuring maximum loudness for every sound in your mix, and your mix as a whole as a result. Not only do clippers tame peaks, but they can also add harmonics that give sounds more texture and depth.
One exciting feature of Fuse Audio’s OCELOT Clipper is its dual knee harmonic shaping capabilities. With the independent positive and negative controls, you can make precise tonal adjustments tailored to the type of signal you’re working with. Importantly, the OCELOT Clipper gives you a wide range of meters to show you exactly how your sound is being affected.
This includes visualizers for the waveform shaping and harmonic distortion, as well as the gain difference between your input and output signals. Also, the OCELOT Clipper is CPU-friendly so you can use as many instances as you need, and its latency rating is low enough for use in live sound.
Tops and Flops: SoundCloud Destroys Your Transients?
This week, reports from a number of users surfaced on social media of a degradation in audio quality experienced when uploading tracks to SoundCloud. Instead of simply providing lower bitrate encoding than other platforms, the complaints are far more specific. According to several users who posted waveform comparisons, there is a marked difference in the fidelity of transients of uploaded files.
On YouTube, Weaver Beats looked into the issue on his channel, and found that when he uploaded one of his recent tracks to SoundCloud, the transients showed shaping on their loudest peaks. He wasn’t alone in his findings, and while some users like @Samplifire suggested solutions like “POW-r #3 dithering” and maximizing “mono compatibility on drums“, it still didn’t quite make sense that the transients got altered on SoundCloud and not other streaming platforms.
SoundCloud did respond to the findings of a user called @Naskomusic via its X account, saying that “different transcoding setups” were implemented depending on the material uploaded. The platform outlined the fact that “lossless-to-lossless” was not supported and told users that “we hear you, and I swear we’re working on it”. Is this an acceptable response? What is your recent experience with SoundCloud uploads?
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