Nomad Factory A.M.T. Leveling Amp

The Nomad Factory A.M.T. Leveling Amp is a mastering plug-in that is part of the Analog Mastering Tools bundle of plug-ins from Nomad Factory. It can only be purchased within this bundle as far as I know, but luckily the plug-in bundle is cheap enough where this doesn't really matter too much. Also included in the bundle is the Max Warm and Multi Max plug-ins. I don't own this bundle myself at home, as I've just used it at the studio where I work, so I can't speak too much about the installation process. However, the interface of the plug-in is really easy and there definitely isn't much of a learning curve. It's the simplest plug-in of the bunch as well as it's just got two knobs for input threshold and output and a five setting parameter for recovery, also known as release time. There's also a VU meter to show you the amount of gain reduction. A manual shouldn't really be necessary here.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

The studio that I work at has the Nomad Factory A.M.T. Leveling Amp plug-in running on a few different systems. The one that I've used it on is in our main room, which is Pro Tools HD based, as are all of the systems on site. This computer in particular is a Mac Pro consisting of dual 2.66 Ghz Intel Xeon processors and 10 GB of RAM. Even if this wasn't an HD system, the computer alone would certainly have enough processing power on it's own. Since it is indeed on an HD system, it's hard for me to say how well this would run on a non-HD system...

OVERALL OPINION

The Nomad Factory A.M.T. Leveling Amp is a nice little mastering plug-in for getting a quick boost in volume via compression/limiting. It's just about as easy to use as you'll find a plug-in and has a nice looking interface. While A.M.T. stands for Analog Mastering Tools, it's quite obvious that this is indeed not an analog tool. It does however sound pretty good anyway, as it's got a rich sound to it for sure. I definitely wouldn't say that it sounds like a real piece of analog gear, but it's a nice emulation nonetheless. I wouldn't use this for any serious mastering project, as I let the mastering engineers deal with that, but for demos and/or for getting a rough mastering job done, this will do just fine. The plug-in bundle that this is a part of is cheap enough where it's definitely worth considering...