James... « What am I paying for? »
Published on 08/11/11 at 13:57This is probably one of the smallest and easy to install plugins I've ever used. Not much to it really. I don't know if it comes with a manual because I didn't bother looking. The first thing I noticed when I booted this up was no presets. Well that's fine, because upon further inspection I realized all I was looking at was a semi-parametric EQ with some filters. Okay...
SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE
I will say that working with it in Cubase it gives me zero issues. Very stable plugin and it doesn't tax my CPU at all. Then again as far as I can tell there's no complex processing going on here so why should it use many resources at all?
OVERALL OPINION
When I first started using it I was expecting some kind of secret sauce to be involved. Why else would they charge this kind of change for a simple semi-parametic eq filtering master? To my ears that's exactly what it was though. Now I'm not trying to be rude about things, but I can get one of those for free almost anywhere. I pay for one of these because I want it to sound warmer and more pleasant than a cheapo mastering plugin. But the TG honestly doesn't sound any different than the bundle of free master eq plugs I have sitting around.
I went online and started asking around. It seems this plugin is very popular with engineers who used to use the real thing and miss the feel of it in a DAW. Now I can understand that. If you get used to a certain piece of hardware, not other soft based equivalent will feel the same. Makes perfect sense. However, for someone like me who has never seen or used a 12410 I had to stop and wonder why I even needed this. Perhaps I'm expecting too much. I have tried some of the other Abbey Road plugs with mixed results so I'll probably do some reviews on them, but I just didn't hear anything special about this one. From what I hear it is a good emulation though, so maybe its the hardware itself that I don't like.
SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE
I will say that working with it in Cubase it gives me zero issues. Very stable plugin and it doesn't tax my CPU at all. Then again as far as I can tell there's no complex processing going on here so why should it use many resources at all?
OVERALL OPINION
When I first started using it I was expecting some kind of secret sauce to be involved. Why else would they charge this kind of change for a simple semi-parametic eq filtering master? To my ears that's exactly what it was though. Now I'm not trying to be rude about things, but I can get one of those for free almost anywhere. I pay for one of these because I want it to sound warmer and more pleasant than a cheapo mastering plugin. But the TG honestly doesn't sound any different than the bundle of free master eq plugs I have sitting around.
I went online and started asking around. It seems this plugin is very popular with engineers who used to use the real thing and miss the feel of it in a DAW. Now I can understand that. If you get used to a certain piece of hardware, not other soft based equivalent will feel the same. Makes perfect sense. However, for someone like me who has never seen or used a 12410 I had to stop and wonder why I even needed this. Perhaps I'm expecting too much. I have tried some of the other Abbey Road plugs with mixed results so I'll probably do some reviews on them, but I just didn't hear anything special about this one. From what I hear it is a good emulation though, so maybe its the hardware itself that I don't like.